CIS 5-1 February 6, 2006
I. Internet and NII:
A. Top Down
B. Bottom Up
II. Surprise: NII is the Internet
A. FOR the past few years the titans of media and communications have waged a war for the digital future. With great fanfare, telephone and cable TV companies have launched dozens of trials to demonstrate their vision of speedy electronic networks, connecting homes to a boundless trove of information, communication, education and fun. Shambling towards their distant goal of a wired world, they have been too busy to notice the unruly bunch of computer hackers, engineers and students scurrying about at their feet.
B. In mid-1993, with the explosion of the World Wide Web, something new happened: the Internet sprouted multimedia wings. A combination of special software and a way of connecting documents allowed users to travel the network with pictures, sound and video, simply by pointing and clicking a mouse. Suddenly the light dawned. The Internet was not just a way to send e-mail and download the occasional file. It could be a place to visit, full of people and ideas:``cyberspace''.
C. In 1969 there were four hosts, by 1983, about 500. 1987, about 28,000. 1996, about 40 million. Today, over 100,000,000.
1. No communications medium or consumer electronics technology has ever grown as quickly; not the fax machine, not the PC, not even TV.
2. In New, Network Society, the Internet plays the same role that electricity played in Industrial society.
3. Meets essential needs of NII and GII: openness and interactivity.
D. Also involves, up to now, a commercial revolution.
1. Major companies are new, startups: Netscape, Cisco. Big guys in PC world, Intel and Microsoft, are still trying to control this
2. Outside of control of telecom giants
3. Real shock. In the late 1970's, telecoms and computer titans tried to chart the future of communications for decades to come. They planned to build their own digital highways and sell videophones, Videotex and other such wonders. It never happened--consumers were not buying. Instead, the PC arrived, spawning office networks. Once telecoms competition had lowered the cost of connecting these networks, the makings of a highway of a very different kind began to emerge.
III. How
A. Networks want to connect. As Metcalfe's law states, the value of a network increases geometrically with the number of people who use it.
1. Essential issue: common, open, nonproprietary standard: TCP/IP
2. Local area networks linking PCs within offices have been widespread for years, but isolated from each other. The Internet broke that bottleneck. It offers a standard method of transmitting data that works equally well for anything from voice to e-mail. Most importantly, it is in the public domain. Nobody owns it and nobody charges a fee for its use.
3. Proprietary networks using different data standards can be part of the Internet as long as they package their data to the TCP/IP standard when they meet each other. But increasingly they use TCP/IP internally, too, because otherwise they miss out on the thousands of Internet software programs. These allow the Internet to be used for things its founders never imagined, from telephone calls to live rock concerts.
4. An open standard means more users speaking a common language, and hence a potentially huge audience, which makes it worthwhile producing such programs.
5. But software is just the beginning. Internet content--everything from classic books to underground music--is exploding even more spectacularly. This same critical mass of users has stimulated a creative outpouring not seen since the arrival of the PC (another open standard).
a. Without any prospect of profit, thousands of individuals have put millions of pages on-line--anything from complete libraries of technical information to day- by-day personal diaries or mini-directories to their favourite part of the Internet.
b. Challenge to make money, because almost everything is put up for free. So easy to publish. Why do people do it?
IV. Early history
A. Some thirty-five years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war? Postnuclear America would need a command-and-control network, linked from city to city, state to state, base to base.
1. First proposal put out by RAND in 1964. In the first place, the network would *have no central authority.* Furthermore, it would be *designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters.*
2. The network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times. It would be designed from the get-go to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages.
3. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node. Each packet would wind its way through the network on an individual basis.
B. After much discussion, in 1968, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency decided to fund a large, ambitious project. In fall 1969, the first such node was installed in UCLA.
1. By December 1969, there were four nodes on the infant network, which was named ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor. The four computers could transfer data on dedicated high-speed transmission lines. They could even be programmed remotely from the other nodes. Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers could share one another's computer facilities by long-distance. (FTP and Telnet).
2. Electronic mail protocols came soon after, then mailing lists.
3. Great advantage of TCP/IP is was that it could run on any computer. Free software abounded.
C. Birth of the "Internet"
1. As the '70s and '80s advanced, many very different social groups found themselves in possession of powerful computers. It was fairly easy to link these computers to the growing network-of- networks. As the use of TCP/IP became more common, entire other networks fell into the digital embrace of the Internet, and messily adhered. Since the software called TCP/IP was public-domain, and the basic technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its very nature, it was difficult to stop people from barging in and linking up somewhere-or-other. In point of fact, nobody *wanted* to stop them from joining this branching complex of networks, which came to be known as the "Internet."
2. In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act, through its Office of Advanced Scientific Computing. The new NSFNET set a blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster, shinier supercomputers, through thicker, faster links, upgraded and expanded, again and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990. This is when San Diego Supercomputer system became part of backbone.
3. Division of nodes into "domains:" gov, mil, edu, com, org and net.
4. In 1989, ARPANET expired, and NSFNET took over.
D. By 1995, all curbs on commercial use of the Net were lifted. In 1996, Net was completely privatized. kind began to emerge.