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Government, Business, and the Making of the Internet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Janet Abbate
Janet Abbate
Affiliation:
JANET ABBATE is a faculty research scholar in the department of history at theUniversity of Maryland.
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Abstract

In 1969, when few commercial communications networks existed, a U.S. Defense Department research agency created an experimental system that would eventually become the Internet. Driven by both research and military considerations, the designers of the Internet created a complex, robust, and flexible system that differed in significant ways from contemporary commercial communications networks. In the 1970s and 1980s, computer manufacturers (mainly based in the United States) and telecommunications carriers (mainly operating outside the United States) vied to offer commercial network products and services, but no single company or technology was able to dominate the market, in part because computer users preferred the type of nonproprietary technical standards used in the Internet. In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation took over operation of the Internet, and in the 1990s the NSF turned over the network to privatesector operators. While the Internet has rapidly increased in scale under commercial ownership, the technology also continues to reflect the systems research origins.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 75 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Computers and Communications Networks , Spring 2001 , pp. 147 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2001

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References

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8 Bolt Beranek & Newman subsequently built a series of networks for military intelligence agencies (Eric Elsam, telephone conversation with the author, 22 July 1997). Vint Cerf, one of main creators of the Internet, wrote frequently about the technology's military utility. See Cerf, Vinton G., “DARPA Activities in Packet Network Interconnection,” in Beauchamp, K. G., Interlinking of Computer Networks (Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 1979Google Scholar); Cerf, Vinton G. and Cain, Edward, “The DoD Internet Architecture Model,” Computer Networks 7 (1983Google Scholar); Cerf, Vinton G. and Lyons, Robert E., “Military Requirements for Packet-Switched Networks and Their Implications for Protocol Standardization,” Computer Networks 1 (1983).Google Scholar

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16 Tymshare's main computer, called the XDS 940, was actually based on an ARPA-sponsored experimental computer built at the University of California at Berkeley. This does not necessarily indicate a close connection between ARPA and Tymshare, but rather reflects ARPA's dominant role in funding computer science research during the 1960s.

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25 Electronic mail, which already existed on time-sharing computers, was added to the ARPANET protocols in 1973. The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1990.

26 Lawrence G. Roberts, “Data by the Packet,” IEEE Spectrum (February 1974): 46. These cost savings were probably overstated, since ARPA would not necessarily have bought all of those extra computers for its contractors.

27 In fact, many contractors expressed a preference to have “their own machines” when the ARPANET idea was first presented by ARPA. See Abbate, Janet, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 50Google Scholar. A historical irony is that, since the price of computer power was rapidly falling, in a few years it might actually have been more cost-effective for ARPA to provide the additional computers than to build a network to share its existing machines. The window of opportunity between the time the ARPANET became technically feasible and when it ceased to make sense in purely economic terms may have been rather small. Of course, cost savings was only one goal of the ARPANET and probably meant more to ARPA's congressional sponsors than to the ARPANET community itself.

28 Lawrence G. Roberts, “Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication,” ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, 1967, 1.

29 A number of early nonprofit networks were built for this same reason: sharing computers without incurring excessive communications costs. A typical project was the 1966 Triangle Universities Computation Center Network, a cooperative project of Duke University, North Carolina State University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This connected IBM 360 computers at the three computing centers, using leased lines that allowed users to transfer data between the three sites. See David J. Farber, “Networks: An Introduction,” Datamation (April 1972): 39. ARPA funded a similar network connecting IBM 360 computers at Carnegie-Mellon and Princeton. See Carr, C. Stephen, Crocker, Stephen D., and Cerf, Vinton G., “Host-Host Communication Protocol in the ARPA Network,” Proceedings AFIPS Spring Joint Computer Conference 36 (May 1970): 5–7, 77Google Scholar; Norberg and O'Neill, Transforming Computer Technology, 158. Dartmouth College had developed a network to connect student terminals to its time-sharing computers in 1964; with the help of an NSF grant, it expanded the network in 1967 to connect schools in Massachusetts and New Jersey. In 1965 General Electric's Information Systems division, which had provided equipment for Dartmouth, used a version of the Dartmouth system to build a network to support its own commercial time-sharing service, which served twenty-five U.S. cities as well as sites in Canada, Mexico, Britain, the Netherlands, and France. See Frisch, Ivan T. and Frank, Howard, “Computer Communications—How We Got Where We Are,” AFIPS National Computer Conference 44 (1975)Google Scholar.

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32 Lawrence Roberts, “The Evolution of Packet Switching,” 1310. Telenet was acquired by GTE in 1979 and then by Sprint in 1986.

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36 See Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 106–10, for an account of the rise of ARPANET e-mail.

37 MCI Mail was initiated by Bob Harchasik, who had come to MCI after serving as president of Tymnet, and the project was managed by Vint Cerf, who had led much of the Internet development at ARPA. Vint Cerf, interview by Judy O'Neill, 24 April 1990, Charles Babbage Institute archive.

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43 Matsushita's Japan Victor Company (JVC) brought out VHS in 1976; the competing Betamax system had been introduced by Sony in 1975.

44 The battle between public and private networking standards is described in more detail in Abbate, Janet, “The Internet Challenge: Conflict and Compromise in Computer Networking,” in Summerton, Jane, ed., Changing Large Technical Systems (Boulder, Colo., 1994Google Scholar); and in Abbate, Inventing the Internet, ch. 5.

45 Paul L. Peck, “Effective Corporate Networking, Organization, and Standardization,” 564.

46 Cerf, Vinton G. and Kahn, Robert E., “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” IEEE Transactions on Communications COM–22 (May 1974): 637–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Originally there was only one protocol, TCP, but it was later split into TCP and IP.

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50 In contrast, later derivatives of UNIX have been in the public domain, most notably the Linux operating system. Linux was initially developed by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds and was later adopted by the Free Software Foundation, based in Cambridge, Mass., and headed by former MIT computer scientist Richard Stallman.

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55 Heidi B. Heiden, telephone conversation with author, 30 July 1997.

56 Charles Hornig, “A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams over Ethernet Net-works,” RFC 894, 1984.

57 John S. Quarterman, The Matrix, 301–38. The seven new networks were BARRNet (in the San Francisco Bay area); MIDNet (in the Midwest); NorthWestNet; NYSERNet (in the New York area); Sesquinet (in Texas); SURAnet (in the Southeast); and WESTNET (in the Rocky Mountain region).

58 Stephen Wolff, “Merit Retires NSFNET Backbone Service” (e-mail to com-priv and farnet members, 1991, available at nic.merit.edu/cise/pdp.txt).

59 Stephen Wolff, “Merit Retires NSFNET Backbone Service.” In fact, the granting of NSF contracts to IBM and MCI was somewhat controversial within the Internet community; NSF manager Stephen Wolff noted that there was “widespread skepticism” about this award, since neither of the companies had any experience with TCP/IP (ibid).

60 Merit, “NSFNET: A Partnership for High-Speed Networking” (http://www.merit.edu/merit/archive/nsfnet/final.report). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this reference.

61 The 1992 version of the NSF's Acceptable Use Policy is reprinted in Krol, Ed, The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog (Sebastopol, Calif, 1992), 353–4Google Scholar.

62 PSINet corporate web page, http://www.psi.net/profile/history.html.

63 PSINet corporate web page.

64 MERIT, “Merit Retires NSFNET Backbone Service,” nic.merit.edu/nsfnet/news. releases/nsfhet.retired, 1995; Stephen Wolff, “Merit Retires NSFNET Backbone Service,” e-mail to com-priv and farnet members, 1991, available at nic.merit.edu/cise/pdp.txt.

65 MERIT, “Merit Retires NSFNET Backbone Service.”