The Evolving Internet
Lecture at Vickram College of Engineering, Madurai
Tim Berners-Lee and Vinton Cerf
Dr. T V Gopal
Chairman, CSI Division II [Software] & Professor,
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
College of Engineering
Anna University
Chennai – 600 025, INDIA
e-mail : gopal@annauniv.edu
Home Page : http://www.annauniv.edu/staff/gopal
THE VISIONARIES






Visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s
J.C.R. Licklider of MIT first proposed a global
network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it.
Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed
the theory of packet switching, which was to form the
basis of Internet connections.
Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts
computer with a California computer in 1965 over
dial-up telephone lines. It showed that the telephone
line's circuit switching was inadequate.
Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed
his plan for ARPANET.
These visionaries and many more left unnamed
here are the real founders of the Internet.
THE BEGINNING

When the late Senator Ted Kennedy heard in 1968
that the pioneering Massachusetts company BBN had
won the ARPA contract for an "interface message
processor (IMP)," he sent a congratulatory telegram
to BBN for their ecumenical spirit in winning the
"interfaith message processor" contract.
Who was the first to use the Internet?
Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on ARPANet as he tried to connect
to Stanford Research Institute on Oct 29, 1969. The system crashed as he
reached the G in LOGIN!
THE INTERNET





The Internet was designed to provide a
communications network that would work even if
some of the major sites were down.
If the most direct route was not available, routers
would direct traffic around the network via alternate
routes.
The early Internet was used by computer
experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians.
There was nothing friendly about it.
There were no home or office personal
computers in those days, and anyone who used it,
whether a computer professional or an engineer or
scientist or librarian, had to learn to use a very
complex system.
E-MAIL





E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson
of BBN in 1972.
He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on
his teletype to link the username and address.
The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote
computer, was published as a Request for Comments
(RFC) in 1972.
RFC's are a means of sharing developmental work
throughout community.
The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between
Internet sites, was published as an RFC in 1973, and
from then on RFC's were available electronically to
anyone who had use of the ftp protocol.
LIBRARIES




Libraries began automating and networking their
catalogs in the late 1960s independent from ARPA.
The visionary Frederick G. Kilgour of the Ohio
College Library Center (now OCLC, Inc.) led
networking of Ohio libraries during the '60s and '70s.
In the mid 1970s more regional consortia from New
England, the Southwest states, and the Middle
Atlantic states and so on, joined with Ohio to form a
national, later international, network.
Automated catalogs, not very user-friendly at first,
became available to the world, first through telnet or
the awkward IBM variant TN3270 and only many
years later, through the web.
ETHERNET
Ethernet, a protocol for many local networks,
appeared in 1974, an outgrowth of Harvard
student Bob Metcalfe's dissertation on "Packet
Networks."
 The dissertation was initially rejected by
the University for not being analytical
enough.
 It later won acceptance when he added some
more equations to it.

MATURITY




The Internet matured in the 70's as a result of the
TCP/IP architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at
BBN and further developed by Kahn and Vinton Cerf
at Stanford and others throughout the 70's.
It was adopted by the Defense Department in 1980
replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP)
and universally adopted by 1983.
The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP) was invented
in 1978 at Bell Labs. Usenet was started in 1979
based on UUCP. Newsgroups.
Usenet is not considered as part of the Internet, since
it does not share the use of TCP/IP. However, it
linked UNIX systems around the world, and many
Internet sites took advantage of the availability of
newsgroups.
BECAUSE IT IS TIME



BITNET (Because It's Time Network) connected IBM
mainframes around the educational community and
the world to provide mail services beginning in 1981.
Listserv software was developed for this network and
later others. Gateways were developed to connect
BITNET with the Internet and allowed exchange of email, particularly for e-mail discussion lists.
In times past, it was fascinating to watch a BITNET
message we sent as it proceeded from one stop to the
next along the way to its destination. We would see it
arrive at a site and then see it transmitted along to
the next site and the next site and the next. The
pace of life was slower then!
NSFNET




In 1986, the National Science Foundation funded
NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for the
Internet.
They maintained their sponsorship for nearly a
decade, setting rules for its non-commercial
government and research uses.
As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were
standardized, it became a lot easier for non-technical
people to learn to use the nets.
It was not easy by today's standards by any means,
but it did open up use of the Internet to many more
people in universities in particular. Other
departments besides the libraries, computer, physics,
and engineering departments found ways to make
good use of the nets.
ARCHIE




The first effort, other than library catalogs, to index
the Internet was created in 1989, as Peter Deutsch
and Alan Emtage, students at McGill University in
Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which they
named Archie.
This software would periodically reach out to all
known openly available ftp sites, list their files, and
build a searchable index of the software.
The commands to search Archie were unix commands,
and it took some knowledge of unix to use it to its full
capability.
Administrators were concerned that the University
was subsidizing such a volume of traffic, and closed
down Archie to outside access. Fortunately, by that
time, there were many more Archies available.
WAIS





Brewster Kahle, then at Thinking Machines, Corp.
developed his Wide Area Information Server (WAIS),
which would index the full text of files in a database
and allow searches of the files.
There were several versions with varying degrees of
complexity and capability developed.
At its peak, Thinking Machines maintained pointers
to over 600 databases around the world which had
been indexed by WAIS.
They included such things as the full set of Usenet
Frequently Asked Questions files, the full
documentation of working papers such as RFC's by
those developing the Internet's standards, and much
more.
Like Archie, its interface was far from intuitive, and
it took some effort to learn to use it well.
HYTELNET
Peter Scott of the University of Saskatchewan,
recognizing the need to bring together
information about all the telnet-accessible library
catalogs on the web, as well as other telnet
resources, brought out his Hytelnet catalog in
1990.
 It gave a single place to get information about
library catalogs and other telnet resources and
how to use them.
 He maintained it for years, and added HyWebCat
in 1997 to provide information on web-based
catalogs.

GOPHER – USER FRIENDLY







In 1991, the first really friendly interface to the Internet
was developed at the University of Minnesota.
The University wanted to develop a simple menu system to
access files and information on campus through their local
network.
The client-server advocates said they could put up a
prototype very quickly, they were given the go-ahead to do
a demonstration system.
The demonstration system was called a gopher after
the U of Minnesota mascot--the golden gopher.
The gopher proved to be very prolific, and within a
few years there were over 10,000 gophers around the
world.
It takes no knowledge of UNIX or computer architecture to
use.
In a gopher system, you type or click on a number to select
the menu selection you want.
VERONICA AND JUGHEAD






Gopher's usability was enhanced much more when the
University of Nevada at Reno developed the VERONICA
searchable index of gopher menus.
It was purported to be an acronym for Very Easy RodentOriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives.
A spider crawled gopher menus around the world,
collecting links and retrieving them for the index.
It was so popular that it was very hard to connect to, even
though a number of other VERONICA sites were developed
to ease the load.
Similar indexing software was developed for single sites,
called JUGHEAD (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy
Excavation And Display).
Peter Deutsch, who developed Archie, always insisted that
Archie was short for Archiver, and had nothing to do with
the comic strip. He was disgusted when VERONICA and
JUGHEAD appeared.
INTERNET CABLING IN CALIFORNIA
TIM BERNERS - LEE
In 1989 another significant event took place in
making the nets easier to use.
 Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European
Laboratory for Particle Physics, more popularly
known as CERN, proposed a new protocol for
information distribution.
 This protocol, which became the World Wide Web
in 1991, was based on hypertext--a system of
embedding links in text to link to other text,
which you have been using every time you
selected a text link while reading these pages.
 Although started before gopher, it was slower to
develop.

TIM BERNERS – LEE WROTE…1





There have always been things which people are good at, and
things computers have been good at, and little overlap
between the two.
One of the things computers have not done for an organization
is to be able to store random associations between disparate
things, although this is something the brain has always done
relatively well.
In 1980 I played with programs to store information with
random links, and in 1989, while working at the European
Particle Physics Laboratory, I proposed that a global
hypertext space be created in which any network-accessible
information could be refered to by a single "Universal
Document Identifier".
Given the go-ahead to experiment by my boss, Mike Sendall, I
wrote in 1990 a program called "WorldWideWeb", a point and
click hypertext editor which ran on the "NeXT" machine.
This, together with the first Web server, I released to the High
Energy Physics community at first, and to the hypertext and
NeXT communities in the summer of 1991.
TIM BERNERS – LEE WROTE…2



Also available was a "line mode" browser by student
Nicola Pellow, which could be run on almost any
computer. The specifications of UDIs (now URIs),
HyperText
Markup
Language
(HTML)
and
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) published on the
first server in order to promote wide adoption and
discussion.
The dream behind the Web is of a common
information space in which we communicate by
sharing information. Its universality is essential: the
fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it
personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.
There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent
on the Web being so generally used that it became a
realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of
the ways in which we work and play and socialize.
MOSAIC, NETSCAPE & INTERNET
EXPLORER




The development in 1993 of the graphical browser Mosaic
by Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center
For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave the protocol
its big boost.
Later, Andreessen moved to become the brains behind
Netscape Corp., which produced the most successful
graphical type of browser and server until Microsoft
declared war and developed its MicroSoft Internet
Explorer.
Soon after the graphical browser Mosaic was
introduced, the Library of Congress made available
some wonderful graphics of the colorful illustrated
Vatican Scrolls.
With the slow connections of those days, it would
take 20 minutes for a single page to load. We would
start the download, go on coffee break, and return and
marvel at picture that had filled our screen.
COMMERCIAL ONLINE SERVICES





Since the Internet was initially funded by the
government, it was originally limited to research,
education, and government uses.
Commercial uses were prohibited unless they directly
served the goals of research and education.
Delphi was the first national commercial online
service to offer Internet access to its subscribers. It
opened up an email connection in July 1992 and full
Internet service in November 1992.
All pretenses of limitations on commercial use
disappeared in May 1995 when the National Science
Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet
backbone, and all traffic relied on commercial
networks.
AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online.
MICHAEL DERTOUZOS [1936 – 2001]




The early days of the web was a confused period as
many developers tried to put their personal stamp on
ways the web should develop.
The web was threatened with becoming a mass of
unrelated protocols that would require different
software for different applications.
The visionary Michael Dertouzos of MIT's Laboratory
for Computer Sciences persuaded Tim Berners-Lee
and others to form the World Wide Web Consortium
in 1994 to promote and develop standards for the
Web.
Proprietary plug-ins still abound for the web, but the
Consortium has ensured that there are common
standards present in every browser.
 “A
great and lovely man passed away on
27th August.”
– Tim Berners -Lee
THE UBIQUITOUS INTERNET
As the Internet has become ubiquitous, faster,
and increasingly accessible to non-technical
communities, social networking and collaborative
services have grown rapidly, enabling people to
communicate and share interests in many more
ways.
 Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In,
YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, delicious,
blogs, wikis, and many more let people of all
ages rapidly share their interests of the moment
with others everywhere.

SPECTACULAR GROWTH




Twelve years after Charley Kline's first message on the
Arpanet, as it was then known, there were still only 213
computers on the network; but 14 years after that, 16 million
people were online, and email was beginning to change the
world; the first really usable web browser wasn't launched
until 1993, but by 1995 we had Amazon, by 1998 Google, and
by 2001, Wikipedia, at which point there were 513 million
people online.
Today the figure is more like 1.7 billion.
Here's one of countless statistics that are liable to induce
feelings akin to vertigo: on New Year's Day 1994 – only
yesterday, in other words – there were an estimated 623
websites.
In total. On the whole internet. "This isn't a matter of ego or
crowing," says Steve Crocker, who was present that day at
UCLA in 1969, "but there has not been, in the entire history of
mankind, anything that has changed so dramatically as
computer communications, in terms of the rate of change."
INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE
[IETF]
The mandate of the IGF is to:
The Internet Governance
Forum
Discuss public policy issues related to key elements of
Internet governance in order to foster the sustainability,
robustness, security, stability and development of the
Internet;
Facilitate discourse between bodies dealing with different
cross-cutting international public policies regarding the
Internet and discuss issues that do not fall within the scope
of any existing body;
Interface with appropriate inter-governmental
organizations and other institutions on matters under their
purview;
Facilitate the exchange of information and best practices,
and in this regard make full use of the expertise of the
academic, scientific and technical communities;
Advise all stakeholders in proposing ways and means
to accelerate the availability and affordability of the
Internet in the developing world;
Strengthen and enhance the engagement of stakeholders in
existing and/or future Internet governance mechanisms,
particularly those from developing countries;
Identify emerging issues, bring them to the attention of the
relevant bodies and the general public, and, where
appropriate, make recommendations;
Contribute to capacity building for Internet
governance in developing countries, drawing fully
on local sources of knowledge and expertise;
Promote and assess, on an ongoing basis, the embodiment
of WSIS principles in Internet governance processes;
Discuss, inter alia, issues relating to critical Internet
resources;
Help to find solutions to the issues arising from the use and
misuse of the Internet, of particular concern to everyday
users;
Publish its proceedings
TOWARDS E-READINESS
INTERNET OF THINGS
1926: NIKOLA TESLA IN AN INTERVIEW
WITH COLLIERS MAGAZINE:

"When wireless* is perfectly applied the whole earth
will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is,
all things being particles of a real and rhythmic
whole.........and the instruments through which we
shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple
compared with our present telephone. A man will be
able to carry one in his vest pocket."
1990: JOHN ROMKEY CREATED THE FIRST
INTERNET ‘DEVICE’:
A toaster that could be turned on and off over the
Internet.
 At the October '89 INTEROP conference, Dan
Lynch, President of Interop promised Romkey
that, if Romkey was able to "bring up his toaster
on the Net," the appliance would be given star
placement in the floor-wide exhibitors at the
conference. The toaster was connected to a
computer with TCP/IP networking. It then used
an information base (SNMP MIB) to turn the
power on.

‘THE COMPUTER FOR THE 21ST CENTURY’




1991: Mark Weiser's Scientific American article on
ubiquitous computing called ‘The Computer for the
21st Century’ is written.
“The most profound technologies are those that
disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of
everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”.
1993: Created by Quentin Stafford-Fraser and
Paul Jardetzky the Trojan Room Coffee Pot was
located in the 'Trojan Room' within the Computer
Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and was
used to monitor the pot levels with an image being
updated about 3x a minute and sent to the buildings
server.
It was later put online for viewing once browsers
could display images.
INTERNET REFRIGERATOR

2000: Starting off what is now becoming a meme,
LG announces it's first Internet refrigerator
plans.
2008-2009: THE INTERNET OF THINGS
WAS "BORN"



According to Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group
(IBSG), the Internet of Things was born in between
2008 and 2009 at simply the point in time when more
“things or objects” were connected to the Internet
than people.
Citing the growth of smartphones, tablet PCs, etc the
number of devices connected to the Internet was
brought to 12.5 billion in 2010 (Related: see Kevin
Kelly's One Machine), while the world’s human
population increased to 6.8 billion, making the
number of connected devices per person more than 1
(1.84 to be exact) for the first time in history.
2008: U.S. National Intelligence Council listed
the Internet of Things as one of the 6
"Disruptive Civil Technologies" with potential
impacts on US interests out to 2025.
BLAMING TECHNOLOGY
Blaming technology when society goes
wrong is lazy
If you have trouble getting to sleep at night, there's a
good chance that the smartphone in your hand or the
TV working in the background are partially to blame.
When we are faced with a social problem, from
cyber-bullying to privacy breaches, it’s much
easier to blame technology or the company that
provides us with it than to take responsibility
ourselves.
“Blaming
Technology: The
Irrational Search for
Scapegoats”
- Samuel Florman
We can truthfully say that the internet has
changed us, but once we start talking about
“how and why” we need to factor ourselves in as
well.
“AS WE MAY THINK” – VANNEVAR BUSH
[JULY 1945 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE]




The memex (a portmanteau of "memory" and "index")
is the name of the hypothetical proto-hypertext
system that Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 The
Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think".
Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which
individuals would compress and store all of their
books, records, and communications, "mechanized so
that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and
flexibility."
The memex would provide an "enlarged intimate
supplement to one's memory".
The concept of the memex influenced the development
of early hypertext systems (eventually leading to the
creation of the World Wide Web) and personal
knowledge base software.
GLOBAL CONSCIOUS BRAIN



In 1946, an astonishingly complete vision of the future
appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction.
In a story entitled A Logic Named Joe, the author
Murray Leinster envisioned a world in which every
home was equipped with a tabletop box that he called a
"logic":
"You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver
used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the
keys for what you wanna get . . . you punch 'Sally Hancock's
Phone' an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up
with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a
vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the
weather forecast [or] who was mistress of the White House
durin' Garfield's administration . . . that comes on the screen
too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full
of all the facts in creation . . . hooked in with all the other
tanks all over the country . . . The only thing it won't do is tell
you exactly what your wife meant when she said, 'Oh, you
think so, do you?' in that peculiar kinda voice "
WEB SCIENCE
Web science is the socio-technical science that
investigates how the World Wide Web evolves
given the regulations, technology and content
imposed,
engineered
and
contributed,
respectively, as an effect of human behavior and
how the Web vice versa affects human behavior.
 An earlier definition was given by American
computer scientist Ben Shneiderman: "Web
Science" is a term that refers to processing the
information available on the web in similar terms
to those applied to natural environment.

THE WEB SCIENCE TRUST

The Web Science Trust (WST) is a charitable
body with the aim of supporting the global
development of Web Science through a network
of world class laboratories known as WSTnet . It
is hosted by the University of Southampton. The
origins of the Web Science Trust can be found in
the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI)
which was established in 2006.