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The Internet

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Not sure what the net is? Want to know the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet is? Would you like to know how the Internet created and by who?

If you have just answered 'yes' to any of the above then this is the place for you. The following pages discuss the Internet, how it was started and why as well as how the technology behind the net functions, and as with the rest of the guide, you don't need to be geek to understand it - I promise ;).

How it all started

ARPA

Cold War paranoia led to the creation of ARPA, the Advance Research Projects Agency, which was founded in 1958 by the Americans to finance high-tech research. One area ARPA focused it's research on was computer-to-computer communication (in the days when a computer was the size of whole room with lot's of tapes whizzing around) and this idea was pioneered by Leonard Kleinrock who's idea became the foundation behind the ARPANET.

The ARPANET

First of all a myth needs dispelling...

“There is a myth that's been going around for 30 odd years that the ARPANET was constructed to protect the US against a nuclear attack. False - totally false.” - Leonard Kleinrock¹

Rather then give you a second hand account for the creation of the ARPANET I'll let Kleinrock explain it:

“The ARPANET was designed to provide computing capability to the researchers that ARPA was supporting and each one who got a computer would modify it and make it a special purpose machine. So every new guy who came in said ‘not only do I want a machine but I want the capability of all the other machines out there.’

Well obviously we can't do that. And then they conceived the idea of putting together these machines into a network, so if I wanted graphics I could go log on to the machine at Utah and do my graphics there and bring the results back. That was the initial motivation for the ARPANET.” - Leonard Kleinrock¹

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Packet Switching

Computer's in the 60's were (relatively speaking) powerful and expensive, but they spent a lot of time doing nothing while their operators thought about what to get the computer to do next. This led ARPA to find away of giving several users the ability to work at the same time.

ARPA didn't realise it, but the answer was already worked out in England at the National Physical Laboratory by a mathematician (Donald Davies) working on Queue Theory. Davies work led him to the conclusion that queues have two states, they are either small because the network is operating very well or they are very long because the network is overloaded.

There are to ways to prevent queues getting to long - one way is to have high speed lines, the other is to have very short messages or packets. Packet Switching has two features that make it efficient. The first benefit is that...

“When your talking on the telephone and both stop talking your still tying up the line, in Packet Switching that's not the case, you only use the line when sending data. Data traffic is highly bursted which means we send something and stop for a while. And when I'm not sending anything someone else can use the line. That's the beauty of Packet Switching - resource sharing.” - Leonard Kleinrock¹

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The second benefit is that it takes a long message and breaks it up into little pieces. Each piece travels the network and has an address of where it wants to go. They then get re-assembled at the destination.

“The idea was so revolutionary, that it needed something like ARPA had which was a few million dollars that you could through at the proble without having to justify it.” - Donald Davies¹

Which is what ARPA had done. In 1969 the first Packet Switch, the Interface Message Processor (IMP) arrived in Kleinrock's lab on the weekend of Labourday '69. It was small (about the size of a telephone box) and state-of-the-art, 60's state-of-the-art which means that your wrist watch your wearing now has more computing power. The second one was sent out to Stanford Research Institute and the machines were conected together in early Oct' 69.

The first thing they tried to do was log one machine on to the other. The machines were intelligent enough that to login all you had to type was the word LOG and it would automatically add the IN part to what you had typed - computer intelligence sure has come along way since then! Anyway, Kleinrock rang Stanford on the phone and they spoke to each other while trying to login:

“I'm sending the L do you have the L?” to which Stanford would say “Yes, we got the L!”

Can you imagine the excitement!!!

“I'm sending the O do you have the O?”, “Yeah, we got the O!”, “I'm sending the G do you have the G?...”

... at this point the machines crashed! I guess somethings about computers are always the going to be the same :).

The first seeds of what would become the Internet had begun. Throughout the 70's Government research labs at US Universities were wired into the net with ARPA funding. The net grew into a small group of experts at Universities linked together sharing research and information. The technology they invented out grew them almost immediately though with the invention of e-mail.

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

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This is an unofficial guide, the information expressed here may differ from Agnitum's. There is a support forum (no longer run by Agnitum, but by users) if you need more help this is a good place to start. Where information here conflicts with what Agnitum have told you always go with the information given to you by Agnitum.

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