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Happy Birthday, Internet...
10 March 2005
Many technology historians date the origin of the Internet to an experiment conducted by two university students at UCLA – Vinton Cerf and Steven Crocker - on September 2, 1969. They connected two microcomputers by a cable and transmitted data between them, making the first computer network.
Happy belated birthday… by January, 1970, the network had grown to a fulsome three computers!
Others identify it with the commissioning of ARPANET, the US Department of Defence program to create a national network, which was launched in November, 1969. By 1971 it had connected 23 universities and government agencies
And still others peg the date in 1979, when a fledgling company called CompuServe offered the first electronic mail service to personal computer users. Or even January 1983, when ARPANET officially adopted the TCP/IP protocol that’s still in use today.
For most of today’s users, even though the term “Internet” was coined in 1982, the Net began in the mid-1990s, when it became widely available publicly, along with the earliest graphic browsers, like Mosaic.
Milestones aside, the development of the Internet was not a linear process, but rather a synthesis of wildly varying elements of emerging technologies.
Long before the Internet, CompuServe and several competing networks, like The Source and Delphi, were offering a variety of increasingly sophisticated services for personal computer users through dial-up modems. They laid out many of the patterns for today’s Internet uses.
CompuServe was started in 1969 by Jeffrey Wilkins as a time-sharing service that used the nightly downtime of IBM mainframes to provide computing access for companies unable or reluctant to invest in the hardware themselves. He realized the growth in personal computers would change everything, and in 1979 he offered the world’s first public email service. CompuServe soon offered user forums and, in 1980, the world’s first real-time chat system (the CB simulator).
Part of CompuServe’s success was that it was run by volunteers – each forum and virtual “CB channel” had its hosts and moderators who managed the growing volume of posts and chatter for free. I attended the CompuServe school for a three-day training session in moderation in Columbus, Ohio, back in the early 1980s, and moderated the Atari forum there for several years.
Success breeds competition, and companies like Genie, Prodigy, the Source, Delphi and Quantum (renamed in 1989 as America Online, or AOL) soon offered similar services. The disadvantage of all of these was twofold: first they didn’t talk to one another (although there were some efforts towards this late in their lives). I was a sysop on Delphi for a while, too.
Second, they were limited by the slow telephone lines and modems of the day.
CompuServe established 800-number nodes and local lines around Canada and the USA, but they were still restricted to text-only display. When CompuServe began, modems were as big as toaster ovens and had a switch to jump from 110 baud to the sizzling 300 baud setting. It was years before we got to 1200 and eventually 9600 baud. Compare that to today’s dial-up speed of 57,600 baud!
At the same time, many of us ran Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) from our home computers (mine on an Atari 800). A convoluted but effective system allowed one user to send data and posts to another local BBS, then another. The system managed to avoid long distance charges by leap-frogging around the continent, one call at a time. Of course, it was slow, and depended on BBS owners running the sharing software frequently – and not least in finding another BBS turned on and running when you made the call!
CompuServe was sold to AOL in 1997, which remains one of the bigger players in the Internet. ARPANET faded out in 1990. BBS are footnotes in computing history and there are an estimated 43 billion Web pages online, growing daily.
Me, I like to think the Internet began not so much with the hardware, but with the vision. The first person to really give voice to the concept of a worldwide network of computers offering universal access to information, news, data and entertainment was Hugo Award-winning science fiction author, John Brunner. His 1975 novel, Shockwave Rider, essentially laid out the uses and reasons for today’s Internet, and even warned of the dangers of viruses and worms attacking the data. It’s been called the first cyberpunk novel.
Even today, Brunner’s work still resonates – sharing a place with other visionaries like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. I like to think that his imagination may have spurred others to create what he only dreamt of.
Happy belated birthday… by January, 1970, the network had grown to a fulsome three computers!
Others identify it with the commissioning of ARPANET, the US Department of Defence program to create a national network, which was launched in November, 1969. By 1971 it had connected 23 universities and government agencies
And still others peg the date in 1979, when a fledgling company called CompuServe offered the first electronic mail service to personal computer users. Or even January 1983, when ARPANET officially adopted the TCP/IP protocol that’s still in use today.
For most of today’s users, even though the term “Internet” was coined in 1982, the Net began in the mid-1990s, when it became widely available publicly, along with the earliest graphic browsers, like Mosaic.
Milestones aside, the development of the Internet was not a linear process, but rather a synthesis of wildly varying elements of emerging technologies.
Long before the Internet, CompuServe and several competing networks, like The Source and Delphi, were offering a variety of increasingly sophisticated services for personal computer users through dial-up modems. They laid out many of the patterns for today’s Internet uses.
CompuServe was started in 1969 by Jeffrey Wilkins as a time-sharing service that used the nightly downtime of IBM mainframes to provide computing access for companies unable or reluctant to invest in the hardware themselves. He realized the growth in personal computers would change everything, and in 1979 he offered the world’s first public email service. CompuServe soon offered user forums and, in 1980, the world’s first real-time chat system (the CB simulator).
Part of CompuServe’s success was that it was run by volunteers – each forum and virtual “CB channel” had its hosts and moderators who managed the growing volume of posts and chatter for free. I attended the CompuServe school for a three-day training session in moderation in Columbus, Ohio, back in the early 1980s, and moderated the Atari forum there for several years.
Success breeds competition, and companies like Genie, Prodigy, the Source, Delphi and Quantum (renamed in 1989 as America Online, or AOL) soon offered similar services. The disadvantage of all of these was twofold: first they didn’t talk to one another (although there were some efforts towards this late in their lives). I was a sysop on Delphi for a while, too.
Second, they were limited by the slow telephone lines and modems of the day.
CompuServe established 800-number nodes and local lines around Canada and the USA, but they were still restricted to text-only display. When CompuServe began, modems were as big as toaster ovens and had a switch to jump from 110 baud to the sizzling 300 baud setting. It was years before we got to 1200 and eventually 9600 baud. Compare that to today’s dial-up speed of 57,600 baud!
At the same time, many of us ran Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) from our home computers (mine on an Atari 800). A convoluted but effective system allowed one user to send data and posts to another local BBS, then another. The system managed to avoid long distance charges by leap-frogging around the continent, one call at a time. Of course, it was slow, and depended on BBS owners running the sharing software frequently – and not least in finding another BBS turned on and running when you made the call!
CompuServe was sold to AOL in 1997, which remains one of the bigger players in the Internet. ARPANET faded out in 1990. BBS are footnotes in computing history and there are an estimated 43 billion Web pages online, growing daily.
Me, I like to think the Internet began not so much with the hardware, but with the vision. The first person to really give voice to the concept of a worldwide network of computers offering universal access to information, news, data and entertainment was Hugo Award-winning science fiction author, John Brunner. His 1975 novel, Shockwave Rider, essentially laid out the uses and reasons for today’s Internet, and even warned of the dangers of viruses and worms attacking the data. It’s been called the first cyberpunk novel.
Even today, Brunner’s work still resonates – sharing a place with other visionaries like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. I like to think that his imagination may have spurred others to create what he only dreamt of.
