A Brief History of the Internet

When I was a kid, we had to use Archie, WAIS to find things. We had to use gopher. We were on a first name basis with Unix commands. And we liked it. Hell, we loved it.

Do you remember War Games? That early '80s Matthew Broderick flick in which he figures out the secret word that gains him admission to a supercomputer controlling all the US nuclear warheads? Remember what the computer screen looked like? Do you recall lines of white or green text on a black background? Remember the modem? A cradle that the telephone handset nestled into so that Broderick's character could change his grades, play chess with the Department of Defense and unleash US nuclear might in response to a doomsday scenario? Remember? Well, that was the Internet.

The Internet is not just Microsoft Internet Explorer, point-and-click shopping, B2B buzzwords, and AOL. The Internet's been around a lot longer than that. It's earliest incarnation, the Department of Defense's ARPANET, pre-dates Al Gore's first run for Congress.

Sputnik Led To More Than Neil Armstrong's Famous Step

Dwight Eisenhower created Advanced Research Projects Agency ( ARPA) in response to the Russian's 1957 Sputnik launch. By the early 60s, ARPA turned to computer networking and communications. In 1962, Dr. J. C. R. Licklider was put in charge of improving ARPA communication and brought the idea of creating a communication network of linked computers to academia. The idea was to create a decentralized communication system capable of surviving a nuclear attack.

In 1969 a group of UCLA grad students and their professor, Leonard Kleinrock, tried to log on to a computer at Stanford. A telephone in one hand, a computer keyboard in the other, they began to type the word "login". They typed and verified the appearance of each letter with the group at Stanford.

"Do you see the L?"

"Yes, we see the L," came the response.

We typed the O, and we asked, "Do you see the O?"

"Yes we see the O."

Then we typed the G, and the system crashed.

-Sacramento Bee, September 26, 1999.

In 1972, there was a public demonstration of ARPANET; the first email program was written; and, the first chat took place.

In 1973, the first international connections - University College of London (England) and NORSAR (Norway) - were added.

The Internet was going global.

When We Say Archie, We Don't Mean The Guy Standing Between Jughead And Veronica

Imagine trying to find an article on diabetes located on some unknown computer in an unknown file. Imagine that you have to find it by entering the name of the computer and the name of the file rather than by entering in a keyword and choosing from a list of possible articles. That's what it was like in the beginning. You had to know where you were going and how to get there without any directional hints. And, after you found it, you had to download it to your computer so you could look at it.

Then, Peter Deustsch developed Archie, a method of archiving and then searching for files on FTP servers. Brewster Kahle created WAIS, which allowed for the indexing and searching the full text of files. Those helped the finding process. The viewing process was still a lot of work. And then there was Gopher.

Gopher--named for the mascot at the University of Minnesota where Gopher was developed--is a way to allow remote files to be viewed on a computer. This is when the Internet began to get friendly. Look at the list and choose the number. The Gopher interface made life easier.

Veronica (Very Easy, Rodent-Oriented, Net-Wide Index to Computerized Archives) and Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) did come along. Both of these tools were developed to index and search sites on Gopher servers. While Gopher servers, as well as Archie, Jughead, and Veronica, are still around, what came next put an end to their widespread use.

Now It's Time For Those Famous, Three Ws

Technology was moving along. Vint Cerf sketched the basic gateway architecture that would make the Internet possible. TCP/ IP - what would become the protocol for sending and receiving data on the Internet was developed; Archie, Veronica and Jughead meant that remote computers were searchable. Queen Elizabeth II sent an email message. The stage, as they say, was set for Tim Berners-Lee.

At CERN - the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of "distributed computing" and the need to easily browse papers and documents located on other computers without needing to know anything about the other computer. Hypertext--an idea already in use within documents and computer programs--became hyperlinks, allowing a user to jump from one document to another effortlessly. Berners-Lee's original vision of the web had to do with collaboration and creating a cooperative work environment.

It's a standard for thirty-something geeks. In the where-were-you-when-Kennedy-was-shot vein, those first heady days of Mosaic bring on fits of nostalgia worthy of WWII veterans sitting at the front table at a Big Band retrospective. It was pictures. It was the ability to click on an underlined word or phrase and go to an entirely different document on an entirely new computer. You didn't have to know the file structure, the name of the host computer. You didn't have to know any arcane commands. You only had to know that those underlined, blue words meant, "Click here".

Marc Andreessen the brain of Mosaic went on to found a little company called Netscape: dominant in the browser wars until Microsoft grew up with Internet Explorer 4.5.

And now it's a point-and-click world, baby, and you can access it without knowing any of that pesky command-line nonsense. All you need to know is the dot-com address and you're surfing like a pro.

Yeah, but how does it work?

Well, now, that's another article entirely.