The Net

Many years ago a network was born it only had several computers were connected and now that same network has millions of computers connected at all times, it's called the Internet. This paper will explain: the birth, evolution, growth, and how it's changed the world as we know it. The audience for this material would be anyone interested in learning more about the Internet. I will offer a guided tour though the evolution of the Internet and explain what this effect has on its growth and popularity.

An idea was born years ago but not till recently has it come into vision to the rest of the world, it's called the Internet. It's like a plague growing across the world, signs of its growth are seen everywhere. For example, most of all new television commercials have some form of Web address in them for Internet information about their products or service. Most all major companies have web pages and direct Internet connection for customer support The Internet is reaching out and touching everyone's lives even without their knowledge.

"The Internet is first conceived in the early '60s during the Cold War. Under the leadership of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), it grows from a paper architecture into a small network (ARPANET) intended to promote the sharing of super-computers amongst researchers in the United States." (http://www.pbs.org/internet/timeline/)

The purpose of its existence was for fast communication in during a global war or nuclear attack. Analyst projected in a major attack on the United States would destroy most major communications. The government established a new form of network that was large scale and expandable enough for anyone to be connected. The first users of this new network were using it for sharing information and data in research. Now days the most the Internet has to fear is a back-ho from a tractor, or government involvement.

A man by the name of Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published a paper on packet switching theory in July 1961 and the first book on the subject in 1964. This was using tiny of bits of electricity moving though network wire to carry the signal, the very basics to networking. Kleinrock was convinced of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major step along the path towards computer networking. The other key step was to make the computers talk together. To explore this, in 1965 working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the first two computers with a low speed dial-up telephone line, this created the first (however small) wide-area computer network ever built. This was considered a wide-area due to the fact two computers were in different states. The result of this experiment was the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together. Running programs and retrieving data was necessary, on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate for the job. Thomas Merrill and Roberts knew much more work was needed before true networking could be achieved. Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching was confirmed. This was an idea to the world of networking, it was not till later when companies started realizing the usefulness of just what Kleinrock had done. (See Figure #1 at any time for timeline information)

In late 1966 DARPA went into development which later this new computer network concept quickly put together plans for the "ARPANET." The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work. So two different groups of researchers where doing the exact same thing basically and did not know about it till later. The word "packet" was adopted from the work at NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. This was 25 times faster than the first speeds that they were working with at the time. This was also major jump in the speed of packet travel during the day. This new speed would soon become very slow, due to the new amount of network traffic, as many new connections would be introduced.

Connections were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following year. Work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software. At first all software had to be written from scratch but as time went on they adopted what they had learned to create faster networking software. It was not till December 1970 that the Network Working Group (NWG) finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). This was to set the standards for the networking in hopes of creating compatibly for most connections. As the ARPANET sites completed implementing NCP during the period 1971-1972, the network users finally could begin to develop applications.

It was about this time when E-mail was starting to become more relevant to the Internet, due to the new standards that where being set at the time. More and more people were being connected and they were given address names. E-MAIL Stands for Electronic Mail, this is like regular mail, except faster. It only takes less than a second for you to send a message to someone half way across the world. Most Internet Providers give you free e-mail with your Internet package. An e-mail address is like a p.o. box in regular mail. It's made up of your name, or login, then an @ symbol. Then the company that's supplying the e-mail or school. An example is something like yourname@company.com. Over the years E-mail has caused some major problems with the Internet. Powerful software has been developed to search the Internet for E-Mail addresses. Once the address is found it logs them into a huge database. Companies who run and maintain the software then sell their databases to people that want to sell you something or provide you a service. The whole process becomes a huge junk mail system. This is creating many problems with E-mail and also slowing down the Internet. People have been hit with so many junk E-mails at one time that it causes network problems. This junk E-Mail is also known as Spam, unwanted E-mail.

From 1970-1973 the ARPANET is a success from the very beginning. Although it was originally designed to allow scientists to share data and access remote computers, email quickly becomes the most popular application. Electronic mail quickly became very popular with it's growth along with Newsgroups. In 1971 ARPANET grows to 23 hosts connecting large universities and government research centers around the country. Over the next few years ARPANET