IACT303 - 2005 World Wide Networking

1. IACT303 - 2005World Wide Networking Historical Perspectives of the World Wide Web Penney McFarlane The University of Wollongong

2. Objectives • This lecture is a history of how the Internet and WWW have evolved over time • The underlying message is that technology is a product of society and can influence society a number of ways. • Technology does not exist in isolation.

3. The Information Age • The Information Age is a term used to describe the times we live in. The term shows that ‘information’ is crucial to our existence today? • When we talk about the Information Age today we talk about the Internet and modern technologies. However the Information Age started many years ago.

4. The Information Age can be associated with the development of infrastructures such as the railroad. • The telegraph was a complementary technology that found ready application with railroads • Such infrastructure altered the way people did business with one another, interacted and lived. As a consequence the nature of communications changed. • (e.g.see Standage, T. (1999) The Victorian Internet, Weidenfeld & Nicholson)

5. Such systems kept growing, rendering previous communication systems less important • For example on May 10, 1869, The Union Pacific and Central Pacific steam train systems joined at Promontory Point in Utah. • This change resulted in a number of new technologies and infrastructures being developed.

6. Modern Communication Systems • Telephony and wireless technologies (broadcasting) exist but they have converged with a number of other technologies. • The major communications system of the time is the Internet. The problem is few people understand how it was born, developed and will continue to grow. • That said does the development of the Internet exhibits similar properties to communication systems developed years ago?

7. The evolution of the Internet. • People always say the Internet is new - well this is simply not true. • The tools, protocols and services that exist largely today emerged from military end educational research in the 60s, 70’s and 80’s.

8. Research is the key. • President Eisenhower commissioned the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in 1957. In 1959 this agency began research computer networking. • The catalyst for the formulation of ARPA was the USSR’s launch of the Sputnik. • ARPA was formed as part of the DOD (Department of Defense) to establish a relationship between science and technology in the military.

9. In 1962 ARPA was charged with improving the military's use of computers. It was primary responsible for ensuring the US Military could control infrastructure in the event of a major attack. • J. C. . Licklider (who was a psychologist) and leader of the IPTO posed the basic question that has been credited as the idea that started the Internet. • "how do you get uncorrelated ‘sapient’ beings to communicate?"

10. Paul Baran proposed the use of packet switching technologies to develop a robust network. • Where did the term packet switching come from? • In 1966 research from Lawrence G. Roberts of MIT entitled “Towards a cooperative network of time shared computer” solidified the concept of a network. • From 1966 - 1969 many papers flowed from Berkley, Stanford and MIT on the issue of networking.

11. The first installation of a network based on packet switching technology was called ARPANET (1968). • The network was made of 4 nodes, and a 50kbps second link. Organisation involved were; • Stanford Research Institute (SRI) • UCLA (Los Angeles) • UCSB (Santa Barbara) • University of Utah

12. Through out the 60’s and 70’s computer networking had grown in popularity. There was a growing interest and considerable work being done on the development of LAN (Local Area Network) protocols and infrastructure. • The work from ARPA later renamed to DARPA focused on technologies for WANS (Wide Area Network). • The initial communications protocol used for ARPANET was NCP - this was later changed to TCP/IP with works commenced in 1973.

13. The desire.... • The goal was to develop a coherent network with hundreds of sites. • As a consequence of this, work continued in the 70’s to enhance networking. • Ethernet was developed in 1976 by Robert Metcalfe (it still remains crucial to LANS today). • Experimentation continued within the Military on the TCP/IP protocol which was soon applied to ARPANET.

14. By the mid 70’s ARPANET still had a 50kps backbone along with a number of satellite and radio connection. At this point of time there are more then 111 nodes on the network. • The public was first notified of ARPANET in 1972 at the “International Computing Conference”.

15. RFC’s are born. • Another by product of the 1970’s was the RFC. • An RFC is a document which outlines in details how a protocol or technique functions. It can be viewed as a schematic. • RFC stands for ‘Request for Comment’. We regard them as defacto standards.

16. ARPANET and software. • It is all good to have a network in which data can be shared - but there was a need to develop applications which could leverage this new power. • ARPA produced a number of tools through its member departments.

17. The major piece of software developed was the underlying protocol (TCP/IP). • However in the 1970’s a number of applications were developed; • RFC 454 FTP (1974) • RFC 733 Mail Specification (1977) • RFC 748 TelnetTCP/IP did not receive an RFC till 1978.

18. Emerging Networks • The internet as we know it today is a network of networks. The same could be described of ARPANET. • USENET was created in 1979 by Bellovin from the University of North Carolina. • BITNET was created by IBM in 1981 and was used to store and forward data. Mail and list servers ran on this network. • National Science Foundation (NSF) created a backbone called CSNET (Computer Science Network) for organisations without access to ARPANET. Proposals to link them emerged.

19. Other networks also emerged; • Eunet (European Unix Network) became operational in 1982. It provided Email and news services similar to USENET. • By 1981 NCP was deprecated - all nodes on ARPANET were using TCP/IP.

20. Computer Science Grows • Whilst there was all this development on producing a network - people at AT&T were developing a time shared operating system derived from Multics. It was later termed Unix. • A group of students became interested in the new operating system when AT&T staff (Ritchie etc) went to the University of California during study leave.

21. BSD is born. • After the introduction of BSD, ARPANET grew considerably. • The Berkley Software Distribution (BSD) was the first distribution of Unix that was FREE. • Berkley and ARPA joined forces and integrated TCP/IP into BSD. Universities around were world were given this software at no cost. This thus resulted in a huge explosion.

22. Emerging Networks and Upgrades. • In 1984 ARPANET was divided into two networks - MILNET and ARPANET. This was done to facilitate the research aspect of computing. • A new network was developed called NFSNET - it utilised infrastructure from IBM. The network had a number of T1 lines which operated at 1.5Mbps. CSNET remained with old infrastructure.

23. At this point of time there were 1024 nodes on the network.... • From that point on the number of hosts grew quickly (infrastructure generally did not change); • 1985 1961 hosts • 1986 2308 hosts • 1987 28,174 hosts • 1988 56,000 hosts • 1990 313,000 hosts

24. By 1988 the NSFNET upgrade project had been completed. The demand had grown so it was time to upgrade again.

25. The Internet Today • Most of the works in the 90’s focused on making the Internet more accessible and user friendly. So we saw things such as; • NCSA Mosaic (1993) • Internic (1994)

26. A number of new services emerged in the early 90’s such as online banking and ordering. • This has matured significantly since then however now there is more emphasis placed on the sharing of resources. • Through out the 90’s the core infrastructure of ARPANET was changed.

27. 1994 saw the emergence of Internet Service Provides as the result of the restructure of access to the backbone. • In 1995 there were 6,642,000 hosts on the network.

28. The World Wide Web(WWW) • WWW was essentially an idea that was developed in Europe though a number of other developments prior to this were important such as: • Vannevar Bushpublishes As We May Thinkin 1945 • The term "Hypertext" is coined in 1965 • GML developed in 1969; SGML - 1980 (HTML and XML is a subset of SGML) • Apple's HyperCard - 1987

29. WWW was developed at CERN • CERN - a European funded research facility for Nuclear Physics - by Tim Berners-Lee. • This was in response to a number of information-related problems at CERN Berners-Lee described in his paper 'Information Management: A Proposal'.

30. Information Management: A Proposal • Several thousand creative people with common goals • Structure of the organization is a multiply connected "web" whose interconnections evolve with time. • Information about what facilities exist and how to find out about them, travels in the corridor gossip and occasional newsletters • High turnover of people - information is constantly being lost.

31. Information Management: A Proposal • The introduction of the new people demands a fair amount of their time and that of others before they have any idea of what goes on. • The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever. Information that has been recorded sometimes cannot be found. • A local reason for changing something usually has implications for other parts and people of the organisation - they have to be informed.

32. Berners-Lee predicted "[t]he problems this organization meets now (1989)... [are the ones]...which the rest of the world will have to face soon."

33. Who were the key players in the development of the net? • How would rate the importance of each of the following areas: • Government (Military) • Private Sector Research – telecoms and computer companies • Public Sector Research - Universities