2.2 Building the Internet | Internet-Enabled Business Intelligence


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	Internet-Enabled Business Intelligence By William A. Giovinazzo
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	Chapter 2. Evolution to e-Enterprise

2.2 Building the Internet

The emergence of the Internet was the result of several technologies developing in parallel. The Internet's story begins at the height of the cold war, back in 1962. John F. Kennedy was in the White House and Camelot was in full bloom. The gauntlet had been thrown down, and we were facing the Russian challenge to reach the moon. (When they make this book into a movie, the screen will go all wavy at this point.) The good sisters of Saint Agnes School would gather my classmates and me in front of a small black and white television screen to watch the latest space shot.

While we pondered how the space race would change our future world, another development was occurring with much less fanfare. This other development, however, would have as great, if not greater, an impact on all our lives. This was the year that the visionary J. C. R. Licklider was appointed the first head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), a department of the then 4-year-old Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense. Even at this early stage, Licklider envisioned a network spanning the globe. He dubbed this network the Intergalactic Network, where anyone in the world can access any system's applications and data from anywhere . We must emphasize that, for this time, such a vision was remarkable . We are talking about an age before even the simplest of computer networks, much less one that spanned the globe! Even if such a network were in place, data was not standardized. How were systems, all of which were proprietary, to communicate? Still, Licklider had a vision.

The Internet, as stated previously, is the result of many technologies developing in parallel. Two other developments occurred in 1962 that would affect the development of the Internet. First, Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad, which laid the foundation for today's graphical user interfaces. Also, the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), an early warning system, was fully deployed. SAGE was significant in that it used a light-gun to identify moving objects on radar screens. The following year, 1963, Licklider hired Sutherland to work at ARPA. In this same year the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was developed. ASCII was the first standard for computers that allowed systems to exchange information regardless of manufacturer.

Although Licklider left ARPA in 1964, his successor, Ivan Sutherland, continued to work on making a network that spanned the globe a reality. Shortly thereafter, Larry Roberts and Thomas Marill connected a system at MIT with one in Santa Monica using a dedicated telephone line and acoustic couplers. With ARPA funding, they created the first wide-area network. They were still, however, a good way off from the dream that would become the Internet.

Sutherland's stay at IPTO was short, and in 1965 Bob Taylor took over as director. He, like other researchers within ARPA, was faced with the same problem of computer systems that do not easily communicate with one another. Taylor presented these issues to the head of ARPA, Charles Herzfeld. To remedy this situation, a million-dollar networking project was launched to connect all the IPTO contractors. Taylor hired Larry Roberts of MIT to head up this project. Roberts began by convening a conference of ARPA researchers that concluded with Wesley Clark proposing Interface Message Processors . These IMPs, as they were called, were the precursors of modern-day routers.

Again, we see the parallel development of technologies that ultimately led to the Internet. While Roberts and Marill may have succeeded in having systems communicate, their method of using telephone lines wasted bandwidth and was expensive. In 1964, MIT, RAND, and the National Physical Laboratory in Britain developed packet-switching networks. In this scheme, data was put together into fixed-length packets. Network nodes routed the packets by passing them on to the other nodes in the network. Replacing Roberts' and Marill's telephone lines with packet-switching technology for the ARPANET increased line speeds from 2.4 Kbps to 50 Kbps.

In 1968 things began to happen at a quickened pace. ARPA refined the specifications for ARPANET. They also requested quotes for the development of the IMPs. Bolt, Beranek, & Newman (BBN) won the bid and began 1969 with the formation of a team to develop IMP software. Teams were formed at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) to write the software that enables computers to communicate with the IMP. Each team delivered an important piece of the developing Internet. The UCLA team evolved into the Network Working Group and developed the Network Control Protocol (NCP). SRI used it as an opportunity to develop wide-area distributed collaboration while the UCSB team experimented with the display of mathematical functions, using a storage display.

The chaotic decade of the 1960s ended with two momentous events. First, man walked on the moon. Second, October 25, 1969, the Internet was born. Just like any other newborn , the Internet entered the world crying. The first logon attempt crashed the IMP. The second attempt succeeded, and a host-to-host connection was established between UCLA and SRI. While the 1960s gave birth to the Internet, it was in the 1970s that this infant that came crying into the world started to mature. ARPANET began the decade as an experiment, but concluded it as an uncontested success. Throughout this decade developments occurred, sometimes independently of one another, that led to the ultimate success of the Internet.

The first development of the 1970s was the completion of the UNIX operating system by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. While it may seem by today's standards that a universal operating system such as UNIX was inevitable, this was not always the case. Back in that era there was a great deal of cynicism concerning the possibility of a single operating system that would be supported by all platforms. In the days of proprietary hardware and operating systems, the very concept of having a single operating system was so alien that it was chided by many. Today, UNIX support is table stakes for any Independent Software Vendor (ISV) that wants to develop an enterprise class solution.

The other groups that were involved in the development of ARPANET weren't sitting idle either. In 1971 the Network Working Group delivered the Telnet protocol. The protocol provided a way to establish sessions on remote systems over a network. Within this same timeframe, the Networking Working Group also defined the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). FTP allowed the exchange of files between differing systems. Both TCP/IP and UUCP (UNIX-to-UNIX Copy) were incorporated into Berkeley UNIX, a version of UNIX enhanced at UC Berkeley. We will discuss the structure of TCP/IP when we take a closer look at some of the technologies upon which the Internet is based.

Additional developments included the introduction by Bell Labs of a new programming language called C. Ray Tomlinson of BBN introduced the @ sign for email headers. Unfortunately, this conflicted with other networks that used this symbol as a control character, and the controversy over email headers began. Also at this time, Bob Metcalfe of Xerox PARC developed a protocol for Local Area Networks (LANs) that eventually became Ethernet. By the mid-1970s over 3 million packets were traveling across ARPANET among 61 nodes. The network was a success. With IPTO's assignment complete, Licklider (who had temporarily returned to IPTO) turned over the operational responsibilities of ARPANET to the Defense Communications Agency. The first chapter of the Internet story drew to a close.

The next step in the history of the Internet began in 1977. Larry Landweber built THEORYNET, a network that connected part of the University of Wisconsin and provided email to over 100 researchers. Recognizing the importance of what he had created, Landweber started to discuss with other universities the construction of a computer science research network, CSNET. Robert Kahn, representing the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and Kent Curtis of the National Science Foundation (NSF) participated in these discussions. The idea caught on and was refined into a three- tier architecture that included ARPANET, TELENET, and an email-only service. CSNET was built using TCP/IP.

The inclusion of TCP/IP is significant. Many protocols were contending to become the standard, and there was no one clear leader at this time. Even the International Organization for Standards proposed its own Open Systems Interconnection (OSI). In addition to being used for CSNET, however, TCP/IP received greater and greater acceptance in the industry. Berkeley incorporated it into its version of UNIX, which shipped with the newly developed SUN workstations. Finally, in January 1983, ARPANET standardized on TCP/IP. TCP/IP continued to gain popularity, becoming available on most workstations and personal computers.

The NSF took the concept of CSNET a major step forward in 1984. Rather than just supplying an email service between researchers, the NSF sought to establish a way to provide researchers throughout the entire United States with access to supercomputers. In 1985, five supercomputer centers were selected: Cornell Theory Center, the John Von Neumann Center at Princeton, the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). A 56Kbps backbone was established between these centers around which grew regional networks. By the close of 1987, there were approximately 30,000 interconnected networks.

Despite its success, the very nature of ARPANET created limitations. UUNET was established to resolve these issues. This network provided commercial access to UUSCP and USENET newsgroups. At about this same time, 1988, the NSF backbone connection between supercomputers was upgraded to T1. The network also took on more of an international scope with connections to other parts of North America and then to Europe and Japan.

At about this time, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN in Switzerland wrote a proposal for a hypertext markup language. This in and of itself was nothing new. There were at the time various hypertext projects, such as those at Brown University and at Stanford Research Institute. The proposal from CERN, however, described a markup language that was able to execute in a heterogeneous distributed environment. Two years later, students at the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created MOSAIC based on Berners-Lee's proposal. The World Wide Web took flight.

In the past 40 years we have seen private industry work together to develop what Licklider called an " Intergalactic Network." Even legislation played an important role in the development of the Internet: The Gore Bill, for example, was passed in 1991 by Congress to create the National Research and Education Network. All of these things played together to create this vast network in which we have all become entangled. What we have described up to this point is the network itself. Business and the development of the e-enterprise was still a few years in the future.


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