The file browser to the internet

A brief history of the internet

Okay, so up to this point we’ve talked about computing machines— binary code, logic gates, CPUs, their origins as mechanical objects that have solidified into solid-state components, as well as computer storage, the command line, filesystems and the graphical user interface, and a particular focus on the desktop environment.

But that story obviously doesn’t cover arguably the most important way we use computers today, which is to communicate with one another. Our computers are highly networked.

I am actually writing this out on an airplane, and the quiet tool-ness of my computer right now is atypical. I have the blank page of my text editor open, and a few pdfs I downloaded to read, and a wikipedia page with important history-of-the-internet dates which I loaded before we took off. But this is not the way I usually use my computer.

Generally, I am fact-checking and searching while writing. I am accessible to others via slack and discord and imessage, not to mention my 8 email addresses, and twitter and mastodon. I’m so used to switching over to a browser every few minutes for a quick ‘hello’ or a piece of information for my work that it feels strange to simply sit with an open document.

So when did our computers transform from computational tools— devices that process for us— into connection machines?

The internet as we recognize it today began around 1990, but its roots are much longer.

Outside of the realm of science fiction, the first recognizable description of a (still theoretical) internet was in 1962, when a scientist from MIT, JCR Licklider, proposed a “galactic network” of computers that could talk to one another, allowing communication outside of a telephone system. This concept was distributed as a series of memos, addressed to the “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”.

“Consider the situation in which several different centers are netted together, each center being highly individualistic and having its own special language and its own special way of doing things. Is it not desirable, or even necessary for all the centers to agree upon some language or, at least, upon some conventions for asking such questions as “What language do you speak?””

Licklider was thinkinging about computers in a dramatically different way than most folks who used them, as machines that talk (not just count). But these conventions for communication had not yet been developed.

Paul Baran, who was working at RAND corporation (a private nonprofit thinktank that primarily provides research to the army) was researching this topic between 1960 and 1964. In a series of internal documents and finally a book called “On Distributed Communications”, he argued for the power of a totally distributed network;

This proposal was a direct response to Cold War anxieties, a concern about centralized command centers in the face of a direct nuclear attack. (You’ll see as we continue through the timeline of networked system development that almost all of it originated in, or was funded by, the defense department-- an important caveat for those of us that use the internet in our work.)

In 1965, another MIT researcher, Lawrence G. Roberts, developed the idea of “packet switching” (entirely separately, on the 1961 theoretical research of Leonard Kleinrock). Packet switching was the crucial piece of ‘decentralization’, that theoretically would make an internet that was far more robust to physical attack than the telephone system. We still use packet switching today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1tElYnFqL8

Licklider was also employed at DARPA (The Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency), and these proposals were incorporated into ARPAnet (the government’s computer network). The first message was sent on ARPAnet in 1969, a house-sized computer at UCLA in Los Angeles (an IMP), and Douglas Engelbart’s “Augmentation of Human Intellect” project computer at Stanford- the same person that performed the “Mother of All Demos” we watched first class. The message that was sent was “LOGIN”, but it crashed on G— an auspicious start.

“We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI …”,

“We typed the L and we asked on the phone,

“Do you see the L?”

“Yes, we see the L,” came the response.

We typed the O, and we asked, “Do you see the O.”

“Yes, we see the O.”

Then we typed the G, and the system crashed …”

-- Kleinrock

By the end of the year however, 4 computers were on the network (UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah joined), then in 1970 -1971, MIT, Harvard, BBN, Systems Development Corp, Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, Case-Western Reserve U, NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and the U of Illinois. It continued to grow wildly through the 1970s.

A basic version of email was adapted for ARPANET in 1972, with the @ symbol linking the username and address. Academics begin emailing one another jokes and recipes.

The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published as an RFC (request for comments) in 1973, and from then on RFC's were available electronically to anyone who had use of the ftp protocol.

ARPAnet also linked into and added other small networks that had risen on the same research, assimilating University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet and London’s University College and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. However, these systems did not inherently use the same communication protocols, and linking each one into the ARPAnet (or, as it was beginning to to be called, the “Internet” required significant effort).

Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn had been working on a “handshake” protocol that would provide a universal communication baseline for computers on a shared network, which he called “Transmission Control Protocol”. This allowed highly different computers to ‘introduce’ themselves in online space from a distance. They published "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which details the design of TCP, which we still use a modified version of today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEWe-5Bk3Q0

<Video, what is TCP/IP protocol - a bit dry, maybe only watch the useful bits>

In the 1980s, researchers, computer scientists, government officials, academics, and librarians were joined by hobbyists online. USENET formed and hosted news and discussion groups. The National Science Foundation established NSFNET, a dial-up speed internet backbone intended to network academic users with strict non-commercial usage rules. As rules for email, ftp, and other systems were standardized, it became much easier (“easier”) to get online as a layperson.

(1982: The first emoticon - : – ) - From Scott Fahlman in our very own CS department here at CMU. )

At the same time, the first signs of commerce on the internet begin. These are still mostly structural, as opposed to informational. Internet service providers offer connection for a fee. In 1983, the domain name system (DNS) establishes .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org, .net and .int. (Websites previously were numerical IP addresses, such as 123.456.789.10). The first domain (symbolics.com) was registered in 1985.

In 1987, the first home router was shipped, making ‘local area networks’ available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCPzcOTkYg

1989-1991 was a bit of a turning point for the internet. When the number of sites online was small, it was not that difficult to remember resources or keep track of where you liked to hang out. But with tens of thousands of hosts online, it was clear that some sort of indexing and browsing tools would be needed.

In 1989, students at McGill University in Montreal created an automatic ‘archiver’ of ftp sites that they called ‘Archie’. It searched a list of ‘known’ sites, checked for changes, and made a searchable list of content. Eventually, McGill university did a network audit and found that half the internet traffic for all of Canada was going to Archie and took it offline. But by this point, others had copied the concept. There were other archiving and searching attempts made in this period, including the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and the Hytelnet catalog. However, none of these were easy to use- they took specific console commands.

Finally, in 1991, the University of Minnesota developed a system called a “Gopher”, which used files and folders that feel somewhat similar to the way we browse files today. However, the Gopher protocol eventually feel out of favor to HTML.

Tim-Berners Lee, who was at CERN, developed HyperText Markup Language -HTML- from 1989-1991, which continues to have a giant impact on how we use the internet. Before HTML, there was no universal standard for markup styling. It eventually won out over other protocols, and became the dominant way we interact with online content.

In the meantime (back in desktop land) the idea of “hypertext” and “hypermedia” had really come into its own.

In 1987, Bill Atkinson released HyperCard for the Macintosh— it shipped with every new computer, and was a pretty revolutionary application.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquNpWdf9vg (Hypercard- what is it? From 1987! Skip around, its long)

https://hypercardadventures.com/

https://archive.org/details/HyperCardVol1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAOsafCurnQ (homemade hypercard rpg)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyOTq1EpV5o (the manhole- by the folks who made myst, also originally developed on hypercard!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v26Eo2j3fLM (elevator simulator - kind of annoying narrator sorry)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roT9DhDPI9k (The Atkinson lament)

"I missed the mark with HyperCard. I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I'd grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser."

In 1993, the first popular graphical web browser was released (Mosaic), and we’re gonna talk about the history of the internet as we know it -- next time!