In August of 1962, while working at MIT, J.C.R. Licklider wrote a series of memos describing a concept he termed the “Galactic Network.” His vision was of a globally networked system of computers that would facilitate the rapid transfer of data and programs from anywhere, to anywhere. This was made possible in part by Leonard Kleinrock’s work with packet switching. Kleinrock published the first paper on packet switching theory in 1961, and his first book on the subject was published in 1964.
Fast forward a few years, and ARPANET is up and running. In October of 1972, Bob Kahn organized the first public demonstration of ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference. Electronic mail also made its debut at that conference. Up to this point, ARPANET was a closed-architecture system. When Kahn came on board in 1972, he argued for an open-architecture system. He had four main ground rules:
1. Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
2. Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn’t make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source.
3. Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.
4. There would be no global control at the operations level. 1
In the Spring of 1973 Kahn teamed up with Vint Cerf, and from these ground rules came the TCP/IP protocol suite that we still use today.
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1 Information for this post came from: Leiner, Barry M., Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, and Stephen Wolff. “A Brief History of the Internet.” http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml.
[...] have given wonderful descriptions of the history of the internet. I especially like David’s account. So I decided, and hope that Michael approves, to write about the history of the internet as it [...]