Funding a Revolution Government Support for Computing Research (1999) / Chapter Skim
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7 Development of the Internet and the World Wide Web
7 Development of the Internet and the World Wide Web
Pages 169-183
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From page 169... ...
The projects produced communications protocols that define the format of network messages, prototype networks, and application programs such as browsers. This research capitalized on the ubiquity of the nation's telephone network, which provided the underlying physical infrastructure upon which the Internet was built.
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From page 170... ...
These were proprietary systems that, for the most part, owed little to academic research, and indeed were to a large extent invisible to the academic computer networking community. By the late 1980s, IBM's proprietary SNA data networking business unit already had several billions of dollars of annual revenue for networking hardware, software, and services.
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From page 171... ...
Similar work was under way in the United Kingdom, where Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) coined the term "packet." Of course, the United States already had an extensive communications network, the public switched telephone network (PSTN)
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From page 172... ...
These interface message processors (IMPS) each the size of a large refrigerator and painted battleship gray were highly sought after by DARPA-sponsored researchers, who viewed possession of an IMP as evidence they had joined the inner circle of networking research.
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From page 173... ...
led by Stephen Crocker in December 1970 and remained in use until 1983, when it was replaced by TCP/IP. EXPANSION OF THE ARPANET: 1970-1980 Initially conceived as a means of sharing expensive computing resources among ARPA research contractors, the ARPANET evolved in a number of unanticipated directions during the 1970s.
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From page 174... ...
In 1973, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf began to consider ways to interconnect these networks, which had quite different bandwidth, delay, and error properties than did the telephone lines of the ARPANET. The result was TCP/IP, first described in 1973 at an International Network Working Group meeting in England.
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From page 175... ...
Two of the best-known projects were the Atlantic Packet Satellite Experiment and Ethernet. The packet satellite network demonstrated that the protocols developed in Aloha for handling contention between simultaneous users, combined with more traditional reservation schemes, resulted in efficient use of the available bandwidth.
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From page 176... ...
It is a federation of commercial service providers, local educational networks, and private corporate networks, exchanging packets using TCP/IP and other, more specialized protocols. To become part of the Internet, a user need only connect a computer to a port on a service provider's router, obtain an IP address, and begin communicating.
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From page 177... ...
THE NSFNET YEARS: 1980-1990 During the late 1970s, several networks were constructed to serve the needs of particular research communities. These networks typically funded by the federal agency that was the primary supporter of the research area included MFENet, which the Department of Energy established to give its magnetic fusion energy researchers access to supercomputers, and NASA's Space Physics Analysis Network (SPAN)
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From page 178... ...
(Thus, a host named xyz in the computer science department at UC-Berkeley would be named xyz.cs.berkeley.edu.) Servers located throughout the Internet provide translation between the host names used by human users and the IP addresses used by the Internet protocols.
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From page 179... ...
Public access to the Internet expanded rapidly thanks to the ubiquitous nature of the analog telephone network and the availability of modems for connecting computers to this network. Digital transmission became possible throughout the telephone network with the deployment of optical fiber, and the telephone companies leased their broadband digital facilities for connecting routers and regional networks to the developers of the computer network.
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From page 180... ...
Although it never became commercially successful, the mousedriven user interface inspired researchers at Xerox PARC, who were developing personal computing technology. Widespread use of the Web, which now accounts for the largest volume of Internet traffic, was accelerated by the development in 1993 of the Mosaic graphical browser.
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From page 181... ...
Netscape Communications Corporation, which commercialized the Mosaic browser, had sales exceeding $530 million in 1997.5 Microsoft Corporation also entered the market for Web browsers and now competes head-to-head with Netscape. A multitude of other companies offer hardware and software for Internet based systems.
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From page 182... ...
It was originally pursued to make moreefficient use of limited computing capabilities and later seen as a means of linking the research and education communities. The most notable result, however, was the Internet, which has dramatically improved communication across society, changing the way people work, play, and shop.
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From page 183... ...
This work did not figure prominently in AT&T's plans for network deployment, nor did it receive significant attention at IBM, though researchers in both organizations published important papers.
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