1.7 – History of Computer Networking and the Internet

1.7.1 – The Development of Packet Switching: 1961-1972

• Three research groups around the world, each unaware of the other’s work
  • [Leiner 1998], began inventing packet switching as an efficient and robust alternative to circuit switching.
  • The first published work on packet-switching techniques was that of Leonard Kleinrock [Kleinrock 1961: Kleinrock 1964], then a graduate student at MIT. Using queueing theory, Kleinrock’s work elegantly demonstrated the effectiveness of the packet-switching approach for bursty traffic sources.
  • In 1964, Paul Baran [Baran 1964] at the Rand Institute had begun investigating the use of packet switching for secure voice over military networks
  • At the National Physical Laboratory in England, Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury were also developing their idea on packet switching.
• The work at MIT, Rand, and the NPL laid the foundations for today’s Internet.
  • It dates back to the 1960s. J.C.R Licklider [DEC 1990] and Lawrence Roberts, both colleagues of Kleinrock’s at MIT, went on lead the computer science program at the advanced Reasearch Projects Agency (ARPA) in the USA.
    • Roberts published an overall plan for the ARPAnet [Roberts 1967], the first packet-switched computer network and a direct ancestor of today’s public Internet.
    • On Labor Day in 1969, the first packet switch was installed at UCLA under Kleinrock’s supervision, and three additional packet switches were installed shortly thereafter at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), IC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utha. The fledgling precursor of the Internet was four nodes large by the end of 1969.
    • Kleinrock recalls the very first use of the network to perform a remote login from UCLA to SRI, crashin the system [Kleinrock 2004]
  • By 1972 ARPAnet had grown to aprox. 15 nodes and was given its first public demonstration by Robert Kahn. The first host-to-host protocol between ARPAnet end-systems, known as the network-control protocol (NCP), was completed.
• Raymond Tomlinson wrote the first e-mail program in 1972.

1.7.2 Proprietary Networks and Internetworking: 1972-1980

• In the start one had to be actually attached to another ARPAnet IMP to communicate over it.
  • In the mid 1970’s other standalone packet-switching network came alive: ALOHAnet: a microwave network inking universities on the Hawaiian islands
    • A packet-based radio network that allowed multiple remote sites on the Hawaiian islands to communicate with each other.
  • DARPA’s packet-satellite and packet-radio networks
  • Telenet, a BBN commercial packet-switching network based on ARPAnet technology.
  • Cyclades, a French packet-switching network pioneered by Louis Pouzin.
  • Time-sharing netowrks such as Tymnet and the GE Information Services Netowork.
• Pioneering work on interconnecting networks, in essence creating a network of networks, was done by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn.
  • The term internetting was coined to describe the work.
• The early versions of TCP were quite different from today’s TCP.
  • The early versions of TCP combined a realiable in-sequence delivery of data via end-system retransmission with forwarding functions (today performed by IP).
• Early experimentation with TCP, combined with the recognition of the importance of an unreliable, non-flow-controlled, end-to-end transport service for application such as packetized voice, led to the separation of IP out of TCP and the development of the UDP protocol.
  • TCP, UDP and IP were conceptually in place by the end of the 1970s
• The ALOHA protocol was the first multiple-access protocol, allowing geographically distributed users to share a single broadcast communication medium.
• Metcalfe and Boggs built on Abramson’s multiple-access protocol work when they developed the Ethernet protocol for wire-based shared broadcast networks.

1.7.3 – A proliferation of Networks: 1980-1990

• Aprox. 200 hosts connected to ARPAnet by the end of the 1970s.
• By the end of the 1980s the amount of hosts connected to the public Internet was reaching 100k.
  • Much of the growth came from the effort to create computer networks linking universities together.
• BITNET provided e-mail and file transfers among several universities in the Northeast
• CSNET was formed to link university researchers who did not have access to ARPAnet.
• In 1986 NSFNET was created to provide access to NSF-sponsored supercomputing centers.
  • Initial backbone speed of 56kbps, but would be running 1.5Mbps by the end of the decade and would serve as a primary backbone linking regional networks.
• January 1, 1983 saw the first official deployment of TCP/IP as the new standard host protocol for ARPAnet (replacing NCP).
• In the late 1980s important extensions were made to TCP to implement host-based congestion control.
  • The DNS and its 32-bit IP address was also developed.
• In the early 1980s the French launched the Minitel project, and ambitious plan to bring data networking into everyone’s home. Sponsored by the French government, the Minitel system consisted of public packet-switching network, Minitel servers and inexpensive terminals with built-in low-speed modems.
  • Became a huge success in 1984 when the government gave away free Minitel terminals to every French household that wanted one.
  • Included free sites, such as telephone directory sites and well as private sites.
  • It offered more than 20k services on its peak in the mid 1990s.

1.7.4 – The Internet Explosion: The 1990s

• In 1991 NSFNET lifted its restrictions on the use of NSFNET for commercial purposes.
  • NSFNET itself became decommissioned in 1995 with Internet backbone traffic being carried by commercial Internet service Providers.
• The main event of the 1990s was to be emergence of the World Wide Web application. The Web served as a platform for enabling and deploying hundreds of new applications.
  • The Web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee between 1989 and 1991
  • It was based on ideas originating in earlier work on hypertext from the 1940s by Vannevar Bush and since the 1960s by Ted Nelson.
  • It was 200 Web servers by the end of 1993
  • Berners-Lee and his associates developed initial version of HTML, HTTP, a Web server and a browser.
• Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark formed Mosaic Communications which later became Netscape Communications Corporation.
• By 1995, university students were using Netscape browsers to surf the web on a daily basis.
• In 1996, Microsoft started to make browsers, which started the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft, which Microsoft won a few years later.
• By the end of the millennium the Internet was supporting hundreds of popular applications like:
  • E-mail, including attachments and web-accessible e-mail
  • The web, including web browsing and Internet commerce
  • Peer-to-peer file sharing of MP3s, pioneered by Napster
  • Instant messaging, with contact lists

1.7.5 – The New Millennium

• Aggressive deployment of broadband internet access to homes like Fiber
  • Gives growth to video services like YouTube
• Increasing ubiquity of High-speed public Wi-Fi networks and medium-speed Internet access via 4G cellular telephony networks is not only making it possible to remain constantly connected while on the move, but also enabling new location specific applications.
  • The number of wireless devices connecting to the Internet surpassed the number of wired devices in 2011
• Online social networks (F.ex. Facebook) have created massive people networks on top of the Internet.
• Online service providers (F.ex. Google) have deployed their own extensive private networks which not only connect together their globally distributed data centers, but are used to bypass the Internet as much as possibly by peering directly with lower-tier ISPs.
• Many Internet commerce companies are now running their applications in the “cloud”
  • Cloud hosting provides applications scalable computing and storage environments and provide the applications implicit access to their high-performance private networks.