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E-mail and the second network

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E-mail

The 70's was a golden era for the ARPANET, a very dedicate and high powered people each with their own speciality. The ARPANET was now a small club of experts that quickly escaped ARPA's control in the mid 70's as the number of hosts increased and began to grow into many dozens and then into hundreds later on in the decade.

E-mail was

“...an adhoc addon to the network. It was an easy task, we just added it in and suddenly it dominated the traffic on the ARPANET.

That was the first inkling that what was important about this new technology was not that computers could talk to each other, but that people could get into it and talk to each other. This meant that it was not a dry engineering task but now a dynamic human endeavour.” - Leonard Kleinrock¹

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The second network

ARPA scientists had created networking, but it succeeded because of an unrelated development created by researchers at Bell labs. Some of the researchers there hated the programs that they used so much that they decided to make a new one - UNIX.

UNIX. and USENET

UNIX was virtually given away and was (by the mid '70s standards) user friendly. It wasn't long before almost every University had UNIX because of its nominal price. In 1977 a small program was added to UNIX. called UUCP which was a way of sending data, files, etc. from one machine to another automatically. UUCP was designed to allow the updating of a group of machines from one central machine and this was to be accomplished over a modem. It didn't take the users of UNIX long to realise that with UUCP and a few home-made modems that they could make a poor mans net which they called USENET.

Networking had escaped ARPA's control and was now in the hands of students. All over America computers began calling each other up and as USENET machines started calling ARPANET machines the Internet was born.

USENET was designed not to have a controlling centre to it, if a message that was sent out was blocked it would be redirected around the blockage by travelling via another computer, this meant that the network was not controllable and it still isn't to this day.

As the network grew, networking became a social activity instead of a research tool and about 1983-84 networking was brought to the attention of managers because of the people time it now consumed and because the phone bills were getting larger and larger. Infact one company, DEC (Digital Electronic Equipment), was at the time (unbeknownst to its managers) funding USENET courtesy of one of DEC's employees - Armondo Stettner - who provide access for the east coast to connect to the west coast through DEC's phone lines without budgeting for the cost of the calls (which were about 1/4 million). Stettnet managed to convince his bosses that this was was the result of computers dialling each other as a result of routine business. The net had survived it's first encounter with business.

This changed when the Regan Administration got an e-mail from the Soviet President, the 'Evil Empire' was on the net!

¹ Quote from Inside the Internet television programme from the Computers Don't Bite television series by the BBC,1997.

Evil Empires and Censorship

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