Before there was
the internet, there
was the ARPANET.
Ian Evenden speaks
to some of those
who were there,
and discovers how
they set about
building something
that had barely
been imagined
THE IDEA OF A NETWORK which spans the entire world is
not a new one by any means. As far back as 1900, Nikola Tesla
was dreaming of wireless power and message transmission,
though sadly despite his claims, the chances are the wireless
power part of the system would never have worked.
Thinkers and theorists kicked the idea around for much of
the early 20th century, coming up with ways that information
could be stored and accessed long before the technology to
build them was actually available. MIT computer scientist
and later ARPA office head, JCR Licklider, put forward the
somewhat optimistic idea of an ‘intergalactic computer
network’ in the early 1960s, but his work did a lot to ground
the idea in reality instead of science-fiction. His ideas about
an all-encompassing computer network contain almost
everything the internet is today, including the cloud, simple
user interfaces, AI, and ‘time sharing’—the idea of a central
server accessed via several terminals at the same time.
Another concept is that of packet switching, breaking a
stream of data down into parts, each with a header detailing
where it’s going, that allows network hardware to make sure
it ends up in the right place. This allows multiple computers to
communicate on a single network, the data passing through
routers that can decide the best route. This again came about
in the 1960s, as part of research into fault-tolerant networking
at the RAND Corporation, funded by the US Department of
Defense, and through independent work by British scientist
Donald Davies, who coined the term ‘packet switching’.
Only once all these concepts are in place do you have the
origins of the ARPANET, the precursor to today’s internet. In
1966, at the United States Department of Defense’s Advanced
Research Projects Agency, or ARPA—better known today as
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Projects Agency—a project
was initiated to allow access to remote computers. Much of
the work was carried out at UCLA and Stanford Universities.
Today, we have a network of networks, known as
internetworking, but it took until 1969 to connect the first two
computers. Work continued on protocols, culminating in the
Network Control Program, led by Steven Crocker. NCP was
the predecessor to TCP/IP, which was proposed by Vint Cerf
and Robert Kahn in the early 1970s. The document setting
out its initial specification contains the first use of the word
’internet’. Other protocols developed by Crocker’s Network
Working Group include TELNET, FTP, and SMTP. Finally, in
1983, ARPANET transitioned to using TCP/IP, and the modern
internet age began, capped off by the invention of the World
Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1990.
However, in this feature, we’re going to concentrate on the
early structure and hardware rather than the front-end of
the internet. Building the ARPANET required many different
technologies to mesh in ways that, up to this point, hadn’t been
considered. When you’re striking out into unknown territory,
failures are to be expected, but the story of the ARPANET and
internet is one of gradual improvement and expansion over
time, once the initial period of explosive innovation was out of
the way. We may have Web 2.0 and Web3, but down below, the
cables and routers remain much as they were.
Amusingly for anyone who’s ever used a computer, at least,
the first message transmitted over the ARPANET in 1969 was
truncated by a hardware failure. Only the ‘LO’ characters of
LOGIN arrived at the target computer in Stanford, California,
having been sent from UCLA, 350 miles away along the I5,
with a full connection coming an hour later after some frantic
debugging. Let’s hope we make it through the next six pages.APR 2022 MAXIMU MPC 39
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