NEW YORK (AP) - Goofy videos weren't on the minds of Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA when they began tests 40 years ago on what would become the Internet. Neither was social networking, for that matter, nor were most of the other easy-to-use applications that have drawn more than a billion people online.
Instead the researchers sought to create an open network for freely exchanging information, an openness that ultimately spurred the innovation that would later spawn the likes of YouTube, Facebook and the World Wide Web.
There's still plenty of room for innovation today, yet the openness fostering it may be eroding. While the Internet is more widely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threaten to constrict its growth.
A great deal of both historic and modern computer technology was advanced by military investments. Many major pioneer major computing machines technologies were developed for the military or military contractors, including many IBM and Univac units. In the late 1940s and 1950s, nuclear weapon, guided missile, and air defense network research required massive amounts of calculating horsepower and the govt funded projects to increase the state of the art.
I believe defense needs, both telecommunications and weapons systems, took up Bell System efforts in the late 1940s and early 1950s, esp with the Korean War, and slowed down getting caught up with the backlog in consumer service. Indeed, I think in that era the Bell System ran ads explaining just that. The Bell Labs history book series includes one volume just on defense projects.
As an aside, note that Unix is a big part of the Internet and Unix was developed at Bell Labs.
I don't know what they mean by "artificial barriers"; the entire Internet is an "artificial" e.g. man-made entity.
I am far from a technical expert on the Internet structure. But IMHO, a huge mistake was made porting it from the closed university environment to the general public environment and expecting it to work as it did. Many advocates in the early public days thought the Internet would be 'self-policing' so that abuse--the little that there'd be in such a wonderful world--would be easily handled by others. It obviously didn't work out that way; and users today must spend considerable money and time in protection against various kinds of sabotage, e-theft, e-fraud, e-exploitation and e-abuse.
It bugs that to send certain messages on a website that I must decipher oddly shaped and hard-to-read characters as a protection against mass email attacks to the website.
It bugs me that companies provide no other support beyond what their website gives. That is, if you phone them and manage to get ahold of someone, all they can do is read the same screen you can. (Yes, I know that's the company's fault, but the Internet is the tool that makes it easy.)
Indeed, even the university environment was not a free-for-all nor self-policing. Forums and discussions in academia were always moderated. Sometimes moderation was very light, but it was just enough to prevent tempers from getting out of hand or the conversation too far sidetracked. There was always a structure to university activities, even informal ones.
In a previous discussion it was explained that the Internet's automation and lack of controls is today so built into so many systems that "they can't put the genie back into the bottle" else too many commercial systems would fail.
The "Internet" is simply a method of transporting data between locations, in the same way that roads transport physical items - how people use the roads as well as the Internet is not the fault of the actual road they are using or the data pipes that they connect to.
The Internet certainly had/has design issues where people did not anticipate that some with malicious intent would exploit weaknesses, but it is still the responsibility of those who connect to it to not allow their own insufficiently protected systems access to something that could potentially be a threat.
It is not the job of the "Internet" to protect people from threats, in the same way that the roads cannot stop thieves/con-artists/abusers from driving on them.
The foundations of what is todays "Internet" started with a number of U.S. Defense Dept. "Advanced Projects Research Agency" funded 'research' projects.
The 'initial' problem that researchers faced was that the hardware used to build the network was -- like any other computer system of the day -- "un- reliable". Thus one of the original design tasks was to build a 'reliable' network, utilizing 'unreliable' components.
A second design criteria, was that such a network needed to be 'resilient' in the event of damage to the network.
It has been said that the Internet was designed to function even in the event of a nuclear attack; a statement that is not strictly accurate -- there was no explicit consideration of nuclear warfare in the design criteria.
AS an "experimental object" -- something being used to 'conduct research', as distinct from a pure 'production use' system -- the early 'net (commonly referred to as 'the ARPAnet') connected a number of institutions doing ARPA- funded research. It soon expanded to include some of the military agencies/- offices that were sponsoring that funded research.
The ARPAnet, later Internet, architecture did _not_ address some of the 'critical' needs of a military communications system -- notably 'security' related issues; especially the issues that arise with dealing with multiple levels of security on the _same_ system/network.
Probably the 'simplest' historically-accurate answer is to say that today's Internet evolved out of a government-funded academic research project on how to design a 'ruggedized' communications network suitable for military needs.
Well into the 1980s (If not later), the 'ARPAnet' (and successor "NSFnet") backbone had an official policy of 'non-commercial' use only
-- ARPA grantee/ grantor communications, and messaging -about- ARPA research, by project researchers was considered non-commercial, for purposes of this policy.
(The government later specified an "official" network protocol for government, and government supplier use. [google "G.O.S.I.P." for gory details])
However, the 'ARPAnet' _protocols_ were useful enough, and available at essentially no cost -- results of ARPA research products are 'public domain', for anyone to use -- that as the commercial world began to perceive the advantages of 'inter-networking', businesses sprang up that provided 'ARPAnet'-like connectivity (i.e. "IP network services") _without_ the restrictive requirements for going through the ARPAnet/NSFnet backbone.
In less than a decade, there was enough 'backbone-type' connectivity by these entities that 'no one noticed' when the NSFnet backbone was shut down. The government was then *entirely* -out- of the business of operating_/ _managing_ the operation of the "Internet".
BBN was responsible for transparent 'network' email.
You're quite correct that e-mail between users of a _single_ computer system had existed for sometime before that. "Something" that served that function (often _not_ by the name of 'email') existed from shortly after the advent of computer 'time-sharing' systems, and 'on-line' terminals to a mainframe. The first such time-sharing system was DTSS at Dartmouth, which went on-line in 1964.
But roads are not a static design. Road design is constantly evolving to protect motorists.
After modern automobiles hit roads and horrendous crashes resulted, highway engineers studied them and devised ways to reduce crashes and their severity. For example, roads didn't originally have median strips but were added and strengthened to prevent head-on collisions. Roads have received better lighting, better reflective materials on signs and paving, etc.
Further, roads do not operate in isolation. Roads are patrolled by police to enforce traffic laws and safety.
It is true that the motorist remains ultimately responsible for the safety of his trip. However, there is a great deal of effort on safety education, certainly more so than on Internet sabotage protection. There is a great deal of effort on traffic and road nuisance enforcement, as mentioned, certainly more so than on sabotage or nuisance enforcement. And there is a great deal of effort on highway and vehicle engineering.
For example, e-crime sometimes uses unprotected private networks as a jumping point to other computers. AFAIK, little effort is done to get such networks to have proper protection. In contrast, it is the law in most states that seat belts must be worn to protect people.
Another point regarding responsibility and tools. There are tools out there that are powerful, but potentially dangerous to use, so there are laws regulating their use. An individual can't march up to a chain store and order high explosives.
Police regularly run truck inspections and trucks failing the law are cited or even pulled out of service on the spot.
Given the things that are done to protect motorists, I would say it IS the job of the Internet to protect people, as is done on highways. The "three E's": education, enforcement, engineering. Let's see some of that take place on the Internet.
**** Moderator's Note *****
This has wandered away too far from telecom. I'm closing the thread.
I think Professor emeritus Fernando J. Corbato would dispute that claim, since CTSS was first demonstrated in 1961, and was certainly running in July, 1963, when Corbato co-founded Project MAC with Bob Fano and Marvin Minsky. (An IBM 7090 was Project MAC's original computer.)
The *concept* of time-sharing, however, dates to the late 1950s. Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman told me (just today in passing conversation) that he thought it was invented in a conversation between Minsky and John McCarthy at the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial Intelligence (the event for which the term "Artificial Intelligence" was coined). However, McCarthy's 1983 memo about the history of time-sharing doesn't mention anything like this.
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