Webupon

 Many inventions help lead up to this climax including: the telegraph, telephone, radio and of course the computer. The main reason the internet was invented was that the U.S. Army wanted an alternative source of communication because phone lines were very vulnerable to bombs and they were worried of a Soviet attack. Therefore, they decided to set up a project called ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1958.

Leonard Kleinrock:

The idea was first thought up as a series of memos jotted down by Leonard Kleinrock of BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman) in August 1962 on his concept of ‘Intergalactic Computer Network’ almost four years after ARPA was created and  a year after he had published a paper on his ‘packet switching theory’. This ’Galactic’ concept was intended to allow general communication between users with various computers all at once. In October 1963, he was promoted to the head of ‘Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs’ at ARPA. It was here that he convinced Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor and MIT’s Lawrence G. Roberts that this was a very important concept and it needed attention. Though Leonard Kleinrock left before any of his ideas were established, he played an important role in the development of the internet.

Putting the Pieces Together:

By mid-1968, a complete plan had been made, and after the approval of ARPA, a request for a quotation was sent to 140 potential bidders. Most thought the proposal was absurd. Only twelve companies submitted bids, and only four of those twelve were regarded as top in rank. By the end of the year, there were only two, and the team decided to award the contract to BBN on 7 April 1969 (the company Kleinrock worked for when he made the original memos). After Leonard Kleinrock left, Bob Taylor and ARPA continued and grew more interested in creating a computer communication network. So Bob Taylor decided to set up three terminals in his own office connecting to three other terminals, given to the SDC Q-32 in Santa Monica, Project Genie at the University of California, Berkley and the last one in Multics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). All of these terminals were sponsored by ARPA.  His main problem was talking to two or more people at once, because he could communicate with all of the terminals, but only one at a time. Therefore when BBN won the contract, he and his team put IMPs (Interface Message Processors now called routers) at each of the terminals to store information and pass it on to other terminals. These IMPs connected the terminal better, and they used modems to connect the IMPs. After they got the multi-communication down, it was time to expand, so they decided to install the first node in Kleinrock’s Network Measurement Center at UCLA. All this came together in September 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP in UCLA, and it was there where the first host computer was setup.  The computer was Honeywell’s DDP-516. This was the beginning of the ARPANET as it was called, but now known as the internet.

Conclusion:

The internet has revolutionized everything in our lives including our general knowledge, social involvement, and entertainment. It took many years to create, and many inventions to add up to it. It went from an organization to an idea which was taken seriously by few, and then changed into a creation which amazed the world and put them in awe. Now, it is the main source of communication and information for most of the world.

Biographies:

Leonard Kleinrock was one of the founding fathers and had the first basic idea of the internet; he was a psychologist by training and studied how humans interacted with computers. He was a Professor of computer science at U.C.L.A (University of California, Los Angeles), and also the first director of ARPA’s computer science division in 1963.

-         Bob Taylor was the director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office in 1965 after Leonard Kleinrock left. He, too, was a psychologist by training, but he also had a degree in mathematics. He was working for NASA as research manager since 1961 (where he funded Douglas C. Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse) and left to join ARPA.

Important Points:

-         Circuit switching was the first form of transferring data which was used in the telephone. It was basic because it could only do one-on-one information sending, as in the source of the information could only be sent to one listener/receiver.

-         Packet switching is the evolved form of ‘Circuit switching’ because instead of having one receiver it could have multiple ones. This was the main boost for the internet. The first published document on this was written by Leonard Kleinrock in July 1961, and the first form of packet switching was made by Larry Roberts in Lincoln Laboratory.

-         ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), also known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is an agency located in the United States Department of Defense and is where the first form of internet was made called ARPANET. This agency was created in 1958.

-         In 1971, Ray Tomlinson of BBN sent the first network email. By 1973, 75% of the ARPANET traffic was email.

-         By 1973, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) specification had been defined and implemented, enabling file transfers over the ARPANET.

-         A Network Voice Protocol (NVP) specifications was also defined (RFC 741) and then implemented, but conference calls over the ARPANET never worked well, for technical reasons; packet voice would not become a workable reality for a few decades.

Bibliography:

·        Vanity Fair, July 2008, pages 96-117.

·        http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml

·        http://www.clipart.com/

·        http://en.wikipedia.com/

·        www.kurzweilai.net/bios/images/taylor.jpg