http://star.pst.qub.ac.uk/~dcjk/internet_hist.html

By Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.sf.ca.us ) 
Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use 

From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION,
February 1993.
F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other 


F&SF Science Column #5

"Internet" 

Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold
War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the US
authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war? 

Postnuclear America would need a command-and-control network,
linked from city to city, state to state, base to base. But no matter how
thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its switches and
wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A
nuclear attack would reduce any conceivable network to tatters. 

And how would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any
central authority, any network central citadel, would be an obvious and
immediate target for an enemy missile. The center of the network would
be the very first place to go. 

RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy, and arrived
at a daring solution. The RAND proposal (the brainchild of RAND staffer
Paul Baran) was made public in 1964. In the first place, the network
would have no central authority. Furthermore, it would be designed from
the beginning to operate while in tatters. 

The principles were simple. The network itself would be assumed to be
unreliable at all times. It would be designed from the get-go to
transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network would be
equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to
originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves
would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each
packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some
other specified destination node. Each packet would wind its way
through the network on an individual basis. 

The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant. Only
final results would count. Basically, the packet would be tossed like a
hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in the direction of its
destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big pieces of the
network had been blown away, that simply wouldn't matter; the packets
would still stay airborne, lateralled wildly across the field by whatever
nodes happened to survive. This rather haphazard delivery system
might be "inefficient" in the usual sense (especially compared to, say,
the telephone system) -- but it would be extremely rugged.

During the 60s, this intriguing concept of a decentralized, blastproof,
packet-switching network was kicked around by RAND, MIT and UCLA.
The National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain set up the first test
network on these principles in 1968. Shortly afterward, the Pentagon's
Advanced Research Projects Agency decided to fund a larger, more
ambitious project in the USA. The nodes of the network were to be
high-speed supercomputers (or what passed for supercomputers at the
time). These were rare and valuable machines which were in real need
of good solid networking, for the sake of national
research-and-development projects.

In fall 1969, the first such node was installed in UCLA. By December
1969, there were four nodes on the infant network, which was named
ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor.

The four computers could transfer data on dedicated high- speed
transmission lines. They could even be programmed remotely from the
other nodes. Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers could
share one another's computer facilities by long-distance. This was a
very handy service, for computer-time was precious in the early '70s. In
1971 there were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by 1972, thirty-seven
nodes. And it was good. 

By the second year of operation, however, an odd fact became clear.
ARPANET's users had warped the computer-sharing network into a
dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post- office. The
main traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing. Instead, it
was news and personal messages. Researchers were using ARPANET
to collaborate on projects, to trade notes on work, and eventually, to
downright gossip and schmooze. People had their own personal user
accounts on the ARPANET computers, and their own personal
addresses for electronic mail. Not only were they using ARPANET for
person-to-person communication, but they were very enthusiastic about
this particular service -- far more enthusiastic than they were about
long-distance computation. 

It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an ARPANET
broadcasting technique in which an identical message could be sent
automatically to large numbers of network subscribers. Interestingly,
one of the first really big mailing-lists was "SF- LOVERS," for science
fiction fans. Discussing science fiction on the network was not
work-related and was frowned upon by many ARPANET computer
administrators, but this didn't stop it from happening. 

Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew. Its decentralized structure
made expansion easy. Unlike standard corporate computer networks,
the ARPA network could accommodate many different kinds of machine.
As long as individual machines could speak the packet-switching lingua
franca of the new, anarchic network, their brand-names, and their
content, and even their ownership, were irrelevant. 

The ARPA's original standard for communication was known as NCP,
"Network Control Protocol," but as time passed and the technique
advanced, NCP was superceded by a higher-level, more sophisticated
standard known as TCP/IP. TCP, or "Transmission Control Protocol,"
converts messages into streams of packets at the source, then
reassembles them back into messages at the destination. IP, or
"Internet Protocol," handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets are
routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks with
multiple standards -- not only ARPA's pioneering NCP standard, but
others like Ethernet, FDDI, and X.25. 

As early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to link to
ARPANET. ARPANET itself remained fairly tightly controlled, at least
until 1983, when its military segment broke off and became MILNET. But
TCP/IP linked them all. And ARPANET itself, though it was growing,
became a smaller and smaller neighborhood amid the vastly growing
galaxy of other linked machines. 

As the '70s and '80s advanced, many very different social groups found
themselves in possession of powerful computers. It was fairly easy to
link these computers to the growing network-of- networks. As the use of
TCP/IP became more common, entire other networks fell into the digital
embrace of the Internet, and messily adhered. Since the software called
TCP/IP was public-domain, and the basic technology was decentralized
and rather anarchic by its very nature, it was difficult to stop people
from barging in and linking up somewhere-or-other. In point of fact,
nobody wanted to stop them from joining this branching complex of
networks, which came to be known as the "Internet." 

Connecting to the Internet cost the taxpayer little or nothing, since each
node was independent, and had to handle its own financing and its own
technical requirements. The more, the merrier. Like the phone network,
the computer network became steadily more valuable as it embraced
larger and larger territories of people and resources. 

A fax machine is only valuable if everybody else has a fax machine. Until
they do, a fax machine is just a curiosity. ARPANET, too, was a curiosity
for a while. Then computer-networking became an utter necessity. 

In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act, through its
Office of Advanced Scientific Computing. The new NSFNET set a
blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster, shinier
supercomputers, through thicker, faster links, upgraded and expanded,
again and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990. And other government agencies
leapt in: NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of
Energy, each of them maintaining a digital satrapy in the Internet
confederation. 

The nodes in this growing network-of-networks were divvied up into
basic varieties. Foreign computers, and a few American ones, chose to
be denoted by their geographical locations. The others were grouped
by the six basic Internet "domains": gov, mil, edu, com, org and net.
(Graceless abbreviations such as this are a standard feature of the
TCP/IP protocols.) Gov, Mil, and Edu denoted governmental, military
and educational institutions, which were, of course, the pioneers, since
ARPANET had begun as a high-tech research exercise in national
security. Com, however, stood for "commercial" institutions, which were
soon bursting into the network like rodeo bulls, surrounded by a
dust-cloud of eager nonprofit "orgs." (The "net" computers served as
gateways between networks.) 

ARPANET itself formally expired in 1989, a happy victim of its own
overwhelming success. Its users scarcely noticed, for ARPANET's
functions not only continued but steadily improved. The use of TCP/IP
standards for computer networking is now global. In 1971, a mere
twenty-one years ago, there were only four nodes in the ARPANET
network. Today there are tens of thousands of nodes in the Internet,
scattered over forty-two countries, with more coming on-line every day.
Three million, possibly four million people use this gigantic
mother-of-all-computer-networks. 

The Internet is especially popular among scientists, and is probably the
most important scientific instrument of the late twentieth century. The
powerful, sophisticated access that it provides to specialized data and
personal communication has sped up the pace of scientific research
enormously. 

The Internet's pace of growth in the early 1990s is spectacular, almost
ferocious. It is spreading faster than cellular phones, faster than fax
machines. Last year the Internet was growing at a rate of twenty percent
a month. The number of "host" machines with direct connection to
TCP/IP has been doubling every year since 1988. The Internet is
moving out of its original base in military and research institutions, into
elementary and high schools, as well as into public libraries and the
commercial sector. 

Why do people want to be "on the Internet?" One of the main reasons is
simple freedom. The Internet is a rare example of a true, modern,
functional anarchy. There is no "Internet Inc." There are no official
censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders. In principle,
any node can speak as a peer to any other node, as long as it obeys
the rules of the TCP/IP protocols, which are strictly technical, not social
or political. (There has been some struggle over commercial use of the
Internet, but that situation is changing as businesses supply their own
links). 

The Internet is also a bargain. The Internet as a whole, unlike the
phone system, doesn't charge for long-distance service. And unlike
most commercial computer networks, it doesn't charge for access time,
either. In fact the "Internet" itself, which doesn't even officially 
exist as an entity, never "charges" for anything. Each group of people 
accessing the Internet is responsible for their own machine and their own 
section of line. 

The Internet's "anarchy" may seem strange or even unnatural, but it
makes a certain deep and basic sense. It's rather like the "anarchy" of
the English language. Nobody rents English, and nobody owns English.
As an English-speaking person, it's up to you to learn how to speak
English properly and make whatever use you please of it (though the
government provides certain subsidies to help you learn to read and
write a bit). Otherwise, everybody just sort of pitches in, and somehow
the thing evolves on its own, and somehow turns out workable. And
interesting. Fascinating, even. Though a lot of people earn their living
from using and exploiting and teaching English, "English" as an
institution is public property, a public good. Much the same goes for the
Internet. Would English be improved if the "The English Language, Inc."
had a board of directors and a chief executive officer, or a President
and a Congress? There'd probably be a lot fewer new words in English,
and a lot fewer new ideas. 

People on the Internet feel much the same way about their own
institution. It's an institution that resists institutionalization. The 
Internet
belongs to everyone and no one.

Still, its various interest groups all have a claim. Business people want
the Internet put on a sounder financial footing. Government people want
the Internet more fully regulated. Academics want it dedicated
exclusively to scholarly research. Military people want it spy-proof and
secure. And so on and so on. 

All these sources of conflict remain in a stumbling balance today, and
the Internet, so far, remains in a thrivingly anarchical condition. Once
upon a time, the NSFnet's high-speed, high-capacity lines were known
as the "Internet Backbone," and their owners could rather lord it over
the rest of the Internet; but today there are "backbones" in Canada,
Japan, and Europe, and even privately owned commercial Internet
backbones specially created for carrying business traffic. Today, even
privately owned desktop computers can become Internet nodes. You
can carry one under your arm. Soon, perhaps, on your wrist. 

But what does one *do* with the Internet? Four things, basically: mail,
discussion groups, long-distance computing, and file transfers. 

Internet mail is "e-mail," electronic mail, faster by several orders of
magnitude than the US Mail, which is scornfully known by Internet
regulars as "snailmail." Internet mail is somewhat like fax. It's electronic
text. But you don't have to pay for it (at least not directly), and it's 
global in scope. E-mail can also send software and certain forms of
compressed digital imagery. New forms of mail are in the works. 

The discussion groups, or "newsgroups," are a world of their own. This
world of news, debate and argument is generally known as "USENET. "
USENET is, in point of fact, quite different from the Internet. USENET is
rather like an enormous billowing crowd of gossipy, news-hungry
people, wandering in and through the Internet on their way to various
private backyard barbecues. USENET is not so much a physical network
as a set of social conventions. In any case, at the moment there are
some 2,500 separate newsgroups on USENET, and their discussions
generate about 7 million words of typed commentary every single day.
Naturally there is a vast amount of talk about computers on USENET,
but the variety of subjects discussed is enormous, and it's growing
larger all the time. USENET also distributes various free electronic
journals and publications. 

Both netnews and e-mail are very widely available, even outside the
high-speed core of the Internet itself. News and e-mail are easily
available over common phone-lines, from Internet fringe- realms like
BITnet, UUCP and Fidonet. The last two Internet services, long-distance
computing and file transfer, require what is known as "direct Internet
access" -- using TCP/IP. 

Long-distance computing was an original inspiration for ARPANET and
is still a very useful service, at least for some. Programmers can
maintain accounts on distant, powerful computers, run programs there
or write their own. Scientists can make use of powerful supercomputers
a continent away. Libraries offer their electronic card catalogs for free
search. Enormous CD-ROM catalogs are increasingly available through
this service. And there are fantastic amounts of free software available. 

File transfers allow Internet users to access remote machines and
retrieve programs or text. Many Internet computers -- some two
thousand of them, so far -- allow any person to access them
anonymously, and to simply copy their public files, free of charge. This
is no small deal, since entire books can be transferred through direct
Internet access in a matter of minutes. Today, in 1992, there are over a
million such public files available to anyone who asks for them (and
many more millions of files are available to people with accounts).
Internet file-transfers are becoming a new form of publishing, in which
the reader simply electronically copies the work on demand, in any
quantity he or she wants, for free. New Internet programs, such as
"archie," "gopher," and "WAIS," have been developed to catalog and
explore these enormous archives of material. 

The headless, anarchic, million-limbed Internet is spreading like
bread-mold. Any computer of sufficient power is a potential spore for
the Internet, and today such computers sell for less than $2,000 and
are in the hands of people all over the world. ARPA's network, designed
to assure control of a ravaged society after a nuclear holocaust, has
been superceded by its mutant child the Internet, which is thoroughly
out of control, and spreading exponentially through the post-Cold War
electronic global village. The spread of the Internet in the 90s
resembles the spread of personal computing in the 1970s, though it is
even faster and perhaps more important. More important, perhaps,
because it may give those personal computers a means of cheap, easy
storage and access that is truly planetary in scale. 

The future of the Internet bids fair to be bigger and exponentially faster.
Commercialization of the Internet is a very hot topic today, with every
manner of wild new commercial information- service promised. The
federal government, pleased with an unsought success, is also still very
much in the act. NREN, the National Research and Education Network,
was approved by the US Congress in fall 1991, as a five-year, $2 billion
project to upgrade the Internet "backbone." NREN will be some fifty
times faster than the fastest network available today, allowing the
electronic transfer of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one hot
second. Computer networks worldwide will feature 3-D animated
graphics, radio and cellular phone-links to portable computers, as well
as fax, voice, and high- definition television. A multimedia global 
circus! 

Or so it's hoped -- and planned. The real Internet of the future may
bear very little resemblance to today's plans. Planning has never
seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development of
the Internet. After all, today's Internet bears little resemblance to those
original grim plans for RAND's post- holocaust command grid. It's a fine
and happy irony. 

How does one get access to the Internet? Well -- if you don't have a
computer and a modem, get one. Your computer can act as a terminal,
and you can use an ordinary telephone line to connect to an
Internet-linked machine. These slower and simpler adjuncts to the
Internet can provide you with the netnews discussion groups and your
own e-mail address. These are services worth having -- though if you
only have mail and news, you're not actually "on the Internet" proper. 

If you're on a campus, your university may have direct "dedicated
access" to high-speed Internet TCP/IP lines. Apply for an Internet
account on a dedicated campus machine, and you may be able to get
those hot-dog long-distance computing and file-transfer functions.
Some cities, such as Cleveland, supply "freenet" community access.
Businesses increasingly have Internet access, and are willing to sell it to
subscribers. The standard fee is about $40 a month -- about the same
as TV cable service. 

As the Nineties proceed, finding a link to the Internet will become much
cheaper and easier. Its ease of use will also improve, which is fine news,
for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves plenty of room for
advancements in user-friendliness. Learning the Internet now, or at
least learning about it, is wise. By the turn of the century, "network
literacy," like "computer literacy" before it, will be forcing itself 
into the
very texture of your life. 



For Further Reading:

The Whole Internet Catalog & User's Guide by Ed Krol. (1992)
O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. 
     A clear, non-jargonized introduction to the intimidating business
     of network literacy. Many computer- documentation manuals
     attempt to be funny. Mr. Krol's book is actually funny. 
The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems
Worldwide. by John Quarterman. Digital Press: Bedford, MA. (1990) 
     Massive and highly technical compendium detailing the
     mind-boggling scope and complexity of our newly networked
     planet. 
The Internet Companion by Tracy LaQuey with Jeanne C. Ryer
(1992) Addison Wesley. 
     Evangelical etiquette guide to the Internet featuring anecdotal
     tales of life-changing Internet experiences. Foreword by Senator
     Al Gore. 
Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide by Brendan P.
Kehoe (1992) Prentice Hall. 
     Brief but useful Internet guide with plenty of good advice on
     useful machines to paw over for data. Mr Kehoe's guide bears
     the singularly wonderful distinction of being available in electronic
     form free of charge. I'm doing the same with all my F&SF Science
     articles, including, of course, this one. My own Internet address is
     bruces@well.sf.ca.us. 



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