The Beginnings of The Internet

It will help in discussing the beginnings of the Internet to define what the Internet is. Now you can get as many different definitions of what the Internet is as you can dictionaries. But for must of us, the simple description, a "worldwide system of interconnected networks and computers" is pretty good and adequate. But when people get more technical, they tend to add to the definition terms such as "a network that uses the Transmission Control Protocol - Internet protocol" (or TCP/IP).Many people have heard that the Internet began with some military computers in the Pentagon called Arpanet in 1969. The theory goes on to suggest that the network was designed to survive a nuclear attack. However, whichever definition of what the Internet is we use, neither the Pentagon nor 1969 hold up as the time and place the Internet was invented. A project which began in the Pentagon that year, called Arpanet, gave birth to the Internet protocols sometime later (during the 1970's), but 1969 was not the Internet's beginnings. Surviving a nuclear attack was not Arpanet's motivation, nor was building a global communications network. Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or Arpanet) program, insists that the purpose was not military, but scientific. The nuclear attack theory was never part of the design. Nor was an Internet in the sense we know it part of the Pentagon's 1969 thinking. Larry Roberts, who was employed by Bob Taylor to build the Arpanet network, states that Arpanet was never intended to link people or be a communications and information facility. Arpanet was about time-sharing. Time sharing tried to make it possible for research institutions to use the processing power of other institutions computers when they had large calculations to do that required more power, or when someone else's facility might do the job better.What Arpanet did in 1969 that was important was to develop a variation of a technique called packet switching. In 1965, before Arpanet came into existence, an Englishman called Donald Davies had proposed a similar facility to Arpanet in the United Kingdom, the NPL Data Communications Network. It never got funded; but Donald Davies did develop the concept of packet switching, a means by which messages can travel from point to point across a network. Although others in the USA were working on packet switching techniques at the same time (notably Leonard Kleinrock and Paul Baran), it was the UK version that Arpanet first adopted.However, although Arpanet developed packet switching, Larry Roberts makes it clear that sending messages between people was "not an important motivation for a network of scientific computers". Its purpose was to allow people in diverse locations to utilise time on other computers. It never really worked as an idea - for a start, all the computers had different operating systems and versions and programs, and using someone else's machine was very difficult: but as well, by the time some of these problems were being overcome, mini-computers had appeared on the scene and the economics of time sharing had changed dramatically.So it's reasonable to say that ARPANET failed in its purpose, but in the process it made some significant discoveries that were to result in the creation of the first Internet. These included email developments, packet switching implementations, and development of the (Transport Control Protocol - Internet Protocol) or TCP/IP.TCP/IP is the backbone protocol which technical people claim is the basis for determining what the Internet is. It was developed in the 1970s in California by Vinton Cerf, Bob Kahn, Bob Braden, Jon Postel and other members of the Networking Group headed by Steve Crocker. TCP/IP was developed to solve problems with earlier attempts at communication between computers undertaken by ARPANET.Vinton Cerf had worked on the earlier Arpanet protocols while at the University of California in Los Angeles from 1968-1972. He moved to Stanford University in late 1972. At the same time Bob Kahn, who had been the chief architect of the Arpanet while working for contracting form Bolt Beranek and Newman, left that firm and joined ARPANET.In October 1972 ARPANET publicly demonstrated their system for the first time at the International Computer Communications Conference in Washington DC. Following that meeting, an International Networking Group chaired by Vinton Cerf was established. Bob Kahn visited Stanford in the spring of 1973 and he and Vint Cerf discussed the problem of interconnecting multiple packet networks that were NOT identical. They developed the basic concepts of TCP at that time, and presented it to the newly established International Networking Group. This meeting and this development really rates as the beginning of the Internet. Nobody knows who first used the word Internet - it just became a shortcut around this time for "internetworking". The earliest written use of the word appears to be by Vint Cerf in 1974.By 1975 the first prototype was being tested. A few more years were spent on technical development, and in 1978 TCP/IPv4 was released.It would be some time before it became available to the rest of us. In fact, TCP/IP was not even added to Arpanet officially until 1983.So we can see that the Internet began as an unanticipated result of an unsuccessful military and academic research program component, and was more a product of the US west coast culture of the 1980s than a product of the post-war Pentagon era.
History of the World Wide Web
Before the World Wide Web the Internet really only provided screens full of text (and usually only in one font and font size). So although it was pretty good for exchanging information, and indeed for accessing information such as the Catalogue of the US Library of Congress, it was visually very boring.In an attempt to make this more aesthetic, companies like Compuserve and AOL began developing what used to be called GUIs (or graphical user interfaces). GUIs added a bit of colour and a bit of layout, but were still pretty boring. Indeed IBM personal computers were only beginning to adopt Windows interfaces - before that with MSDOS interfaces they were pretty primitive. So the Internet might have been useful, but it wasn't good looking.Probably the World Wide Web saved the net. Not only did it change its appearance, it made it possible for pictures and sound to be displayed and exchanged.The web had some important predecessors, perhaps the most significant of these being Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, which worked on the concept of Hypertext - where you could click on a word and it would take you somewhere else. Ted Nelson envisaged with Xanadu a huge library of all the worlds' information. In order to click on hyperlinks, as they were called, Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse, which was to later become a very important part of personal computers. So the idea of clicking on a word or a picture to take you somewhere else was a basic foundation of the web.Another important building block was the URL or Uniform Resource Locator. This allowed you a further option to find your way around by naming a site. Every site on the worldwide web has a unique URL The other feature was Hypertext Markup Language (html), the language that allowed pages to display different fonts and sizes, pictures, colours etc. Before HTML, there was no such standard, and the "GUIs we talked about before only belonged to different computers or different computer software. They could not be networked.It was Tim Berners Lee who brought this all together and created the World Wide Web. The first trials of the World Wide Web were at the CERN laboratories of in Switzerland in December 1990. By 1991 browser and web server software was available, and by 1992 a few preliminary sites existed in places like University of Illinois, where Mark Andreesen became involved. By the end of 1992, there were about 26 sites.The first browser which became popularly available to take advantage of this was Mosaic, in 1993. Mosaic was as slow as a wet week, and really didn't handle downloading pictures well at all - so the early world wide web experience with Mosaic, and with domestic modems that operated at one sixths of current modem speeds at best, were pretty lousy and really didn't give much indication of the potential of this medium. On April 30, 1993 CERN's directors made a statement that was a true milestone in Internet history. On this day, they declared that WWW technology would be freely usable by anyone, with no fees being payable to CERN. This decision - much in line with the decisions of the earlier Internet pioneers to make their products freely available - was a visionary and important one. The browser really did begin to change everything. By the end of 1994 there were a million browser copies in use - rapid growth indeed!! Then we really started to see growth. Every year from 1994 to 2000, the Internet saw massive growth, the like of which had not been seen with any preceding technology. The Internet era had begun.The first search engines began to appear in the mid 1990s, and it didn't take long for Google to come on the scene, and establish a dominant market position.In the early days, the web was mainly used for displaying information. On line shopping, and on line purchase of goods, came a little bit later. The first large commercial site was Amazon, a company which in its initial days concentrated solely on book markets. The Amazon concept was developed in 1994, a year in which some people claim the world wide web grew by an astonishing 2300 percent! Amazon saw that on line shopping was the way of the future, and chose the book market as a field where much could be achieved.By 1998 there were 750,000 commercial sites on the world wide web, and we were beginning to see how the Internet would bring about significant changes to existing industries. In travel for instance, we were able to compare different airlines and hotels and get the cheapest fares and accommodation - something pretty difficult for individuals to do before the world wide web. Hotels began offering last minute rates through specially constructed websites, thus furthering the power of the web as a sales medium.




Internet revolution
It all started in October 1969. Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, were ready for a critical experiment. They had a computer and communications node, while colleagues installed similar equipment up the coast in Menlo Park. They planned to test whether they could link the two computers over telephone lines to operate as one system. The researchers began to tap in the message: 'log in' to make the link. The system crashed.
The commercial importance of this breakthrough was not fulfilled for another 25 years - just as the invention of the steam engine by James Watt in the 1780s did not become really useful and developed until the launch of the rail engine two decades late. Similarly the petrol combustion engine did not lead to cars and trucks for about two decades.
The significance of the internet is that it takes the computer and 'information technology' onto a new stage: computers now communicate with each other. That is producing a dramatic exponential increase in the speed of transmitting information. Computers and the microchip were for the era of the 1970s and 1980s. The 1990s and the first decade of the new Christian-based millennium are for telecommunications and the internet. The internet will expand across the globe just as the railroad did in the latter half of the 19th century and the motor car and airplane did in the latter half of the 20th century. The economic result will be a huge reduction in the time taken to transmit information and, with it, a fall in the costs of producing goods and services.
Internet commerce
By 2003 there will be 500m people connected to the internet, or about 10% of the world's population. By 2003, over 65% of US households will be connected. In the same way that the railroad, motor car, electricity connections and the airplane developed huge new industries and capitalist conglomerates, new internet companies are springing up as fast as you can say .com. By 2004, it is estimated that worldwide business-to-business internet commerce will reach over $7trn. Internet commerce in the US will reach $2.5trn, or about 25% of the annual output of the US in that year. Already the internet companies have grown bigger in size than the former technology giants (airlines, publishing and healthcare) and are catching up the automobile industry quickly.
The impact of the internet revolution has already been felt on economic growth. The information technology sectors as a whole (computers, telecomm, internet, software etc) in the US are growing at double the rate of the rest of the US economy. They now contribute over 8% of US annual output on their own. Indeed, since 1993, without the IT sectors, US economic growth would have been 1% of GDP lower each year. In 1999, nearly 80% of all investment by capitalist companies in the US went into information technology sectors! Over one million jobs have been created by the US high-tech sector since 1993 and there are now 8m people working there at generally 50% higher average wages.
Salvation from the crisis?
Now in the decade of the 2000s it will be the internet. The technological marvel of the internet will not save capitalism from crisis, just as the railroad did not in 1880s and the automobile did not in the 1930s. Indeed, for some very good reasons, it will exacerbate the inevitable slump in capitalist prosperity. The first reason is that, just as the railroad and automobile before, the internet is drastically lowering costs. But this is a huge deflationary force on capitalist companies' ability to keep up prices. Intense competition and huge investment of capital is boosting economic growth now, but it is doing so at the expense of capitalist profitability.
Internet companies do not make any profit. They remain a huge cost to the rest of the economy. But investment in the new technology has become a necessity to compete. This necessity has leapt well beyond the ability to garner surplus value from the investment. Just the top nine Internet companies are worth $100bn on the US stock market. But they make sales of just $1bn, or 1%. And that is just sales. They make no profit. Compare that even to the ten leading technology companies like Microsoft. They are worth only $50bn, but they make $100bn in annual revenues (and some of these make a profit too!). Overinvestment and overcapacity will be the outcome of the internet boom.
The internet and IT revolution is a huge deflationary force on the capitalist economy. That is the result of system that develops technology through competition and private capitalist investment. Intense competition means that very quickly the profitable advantages gained by the first company to use the new technology quickly disappear. The eventual outcome is that everybody uses the new technology and nobody gains extra profit as a result. Investment eventually shoots up much faster than the extra productivity of labour created.
Just a matter of time
It is only a matter of time before the US internet bubble is burst, investments collapse and consumption of the masses falls back because of a loss of confidence in the 'new economy'. The internet revolution is a great technical leap forward. But under capitalism, it is being exploited by more and more precious investment capital being thrown into this tiny sector of the economy at the expense of all the rest. That happens under capitalism because there is no planning and no direction of resources. 'Market forces' mean speculative investment, intense competition between capitalist investors, and above all, huge over-investment in relation to profitability.
The canal share boom of 1835-36 was followed by slump and falling prices. The railway stock mania of 1869-73 was followed by the biggest depression then seen under capitalism. The same was seen in the aftermath of the share boom of the 1920s. Japan's stock market bubble of the 1980s has been followed by ten years of stagnation and recession. The optimists of capitalism believe that the internet revolution is really a low-price low-cost boom that will last decades. The reality is that it is just another speculative financial market bubble that will turn into a deflationary bust. As I write just about everybody in the capitalist world, including former sceptics of internet stocks, now believe that internet companies will continue to drive upwards for the foreseeable future. When everybody agrees, you know it won't last much longer
Revolution of www
The advent of the World Wide Web fits every definition of a revolution. Within a few brief years, the Web has grown from yet another obscure Internet protocol into the world's most widely accepted source of information. Few today question or doubt the efficacy of the Web. For the delivery of digitized material in every conceivable medium and mode, the Web looms as the cornerstone of the information age.
The World Wide Web has changed the way educators think about computers. Across Michigan and across the nation, school districts — from the most financially strapped to the most affluent — are allocating funds and resources to build on-ramps to the information highway. Districts that formerly defeated millages now routinely vote specifically in support of technology for schools. Statistically, the odds are your school is now wired, or will be soon.
As music educators, it behooves us all to become Web-aware — for our students, our programs, our administrators, and our profession. Music resources that were beyond conception a few years ago now await our collective mouse-clicks. To take advantage of the Web, and to make our own contributions, each of us needs to become acquainted with the World Wide Web.
The Web is part of the Internet, a network of networks. Born in the 1950s, when the domain of computer users was confined to research institutions and the military, the Internet was a set of hardware and software standards for exchanging information among computer networks worldwide. A variety of protocols, for electronic mail, file transfer, etc., determined how information was transmitted and received, as long as the information was unadorned text. The Web updated the Internet for the 1990s, a world of desktop computers bearing multimedia capabilities and graphical user interfaces.
Many of the concepts of the Web can be traced to the work of Ted Nelson, the visionary and enigmatic technologist. In the 1970s Nelson began evangelizing his vision of a world in which information would be digital, ubiquitous, and interconnected. In his view, information would be linked in ways more logical than linear. For these links he coined the term "hypertext," and for the world of linked information, "Xanadu." Although careers, companies, and millions of dollars were lost in the failed effort to realize Xanadu, the concept of hypertext took on a life of its own. Computer programmers attempted to create their own realization of hypertext, most notably Bill Atkinson and his HyperCard software for the Macintosh.
Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, claims he arrived at the concept of hypertext independently. Nonetheless, even Nelson has endorsed his implementation. In the early 1990s, Berners-Lee was employed as computer consultant for the Center for Particle Physics Research (CERN) in Geneva. Seeking to provide improved Internet services for the physicists at CERN, he submitted a detailed proposal in 1991 that described the major components of what we now know as the Web:
Hypertext - the means of linking a portion of text to another location within the document, to another document on the computer's hard drive, or to another document anywhere on the Internet;
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) - a means of encoding text with embedded tags, supporting formatted text, hypertext, and additional media;
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) - the means of transmitting and receiving HTML documents on the Internet;
Browser - "client" software that allows users to receive and view HTML documents on their computers.
In Berners-Lee's concept, HTML was to be platform-neutral; in fact, the first Web browser was created for the NeXT computer. In the true spirit of the Internet, CERN made the Web specifications public, allowing anyone to create a browser for interpreting HTML files.
Marc Andreessen did just that. A graduate student at the University of Illinois, Andreessen developed a Web browser called Mosaic for Macintosh and Windows. When the university made the software available free to the public in 1993, the unstoppable revolution had begun. More than ten thousand copies of Mosaic were being downloaded daily from the Illinois site. Users became enthralled with the nascent potential of the Web, and began creating their own Web sites. As the content of the Web grew, it attracted more users. By any measure, the growth was explosive.