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It is hard to say that the Internet was ever really invented in any one place or time. In essence it is the result of a combination of several different technological advancements. Nevertheless, a major, maybe the most major, advancement in developing the Internet, basically the first iteration of what became the Internet, was developed in Cambridge. The start of America's shift towards today’s technology is often linked to the United States government's response to the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 in October 1957. After Sputnik, a distinct change in attitude occurred, different from the history of prolific American scientists and inventors who had marked the entrepreneurial America of earlier years. The year following the launch of Sputnik saw the Eisenhower administration create two major government agencies: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). In 1972, ARPA was renamed DARPA when “Defense” was added to the agency's title. Along with the institutional support for the advancement of technology, computers were rapidly growing as major elements of all technological development throughout the 20th century. In Cambridge, Vannevar Bush had created the first analog computer at MIT, and Howard Aiken later developed the first digital computer at Harvard. At its most basic definition, a computer is a tool which takes instructions (programs) and executes them. The potential of this, as we are still learning, ranges from compiling millions of pages of text into readable formats to the mapping of the entire human genome. Once computer scientists had created reliable computers the next step in the evolution of technology was to create a way to link the computers together on a “network” in order to share information between them. An agency of ARPA called the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) was at the head of networking research. Bob Taylor, who became the third director of IPTO, first considered networking computers together and requested funding in order to explore the idea further. Bob Taylor set up his networking research team in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As discussions progressed for how to implement the networking idea, a major problem was revealed: every computer in existence was essentially speaking its own language. Early ideas of networking involved a main host connecting every computer, but the multiple languages problem would have to be reconciled. Wes Clark realized that instead of a main host, each computer could instead have its own host, called an Interface Message Processor (IMP), which would unify the languages being sent through the network. This idea has developed into the current concept of routers. The goal became to create four IMPs, send them to four universities (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of Utah, and UC Santa Barbara) and send information between the computers through the IMPs. At a conference in 1967, Larry Roberts, head of the ARPA team, met two other men who had simultaneously been working on the same idea. Paul Baran and Donald Davies had each been working to create networks. Davies' word “packet” was incorporated into Roberts' project to describe the language-independent information being sent between computers. In July 1968 ARPA/IPTO sent out a proposal for building the IMPs to over 140 companies, and just before Christmas the contract was awarded to BBN in Cambridge. BBN Technologies (Bolt, Beranek and Newman, now part of the Raytheon Company), was started as an acoustical consulting company in Cambridge, Mass in 1948, by MIT professors Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt, along with Bolt's former student Robert Newman. 1 Since its inception the company had grown and purchased a number of computers, advancing its work into the realm of computer science and technology. Frank Heart, a former computer systems engineer at MIT's Lincoln Lab, working at BBN at the time they were awarded the contract, was the head of the IMP team, which included Ben Barker, Bernie Cosell, Will Crowther, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein, and Dave Walden. In 1969, Frank Heart's team began work on the software that would run the IMPs, while at each of the four sites a team worked on the software to enable their computer to communicate with the IMP. By September installation of the software from all of the groups was complete. The first host-to-host connection, from UCLA to SRI, was attempted in October 1969. The first ‘Log-In’ crashed the IMPs, but the next one worked. The characters “L, G and O " were transferred making the ARPAnet a reality. Each month for the next year, “nodes” of the ARPAnet were added to the network at various institutions. At MIT, Bob Metcalfe built the first high-speed (100 Kbps) network interface between the MIT IMP and a PDP-6 computer to the ARPAnet in 1971. BBN modified and streamlined the ARPAnet for the next several years as microprocessing and increasing speeds enhanced the network. By 1972, ARPAnet was ready to go public. A public demonstration took place at the International Conference on Computer Communication (ICCC) in Washington, DC. In continuing efforts to achieve the goal of a universal, public network, BBN developed software to enable mail to be sent electronically on the ARPAnet. Ray Tomlinson randomly chose the @ sign from the non-alphabet symbols on the keyboard and started the ‘user@host’ convention for e-mails. Other idea continued to be used for about a decade, but by the late 1980s Tomlinson's @ symbol became a worldwide standard for e-mails. Throughout the 1970s, various research groups and institutions developed networks based on ARPA/BBN's IMP-computer network foundation. In 1977 a major demonstration was held internationally ‘internetting’ between the most advanced systems: the Packet Radio net, SATNET, and the ARPAnet. The following year, Vint Cerf at the now-named DARPA , formed an International Cooperation Board chaired by Peter Kirstein of University College London, and an Internet Configuration Control Board, chaired by Dave Clark of MIT, to plan for the future of “internetting.” As the ARPAnet project formally came to completion, a variety of boards, task forces, and people who worked on the team work for the next few years, worked to ensure the original vision of a free, public, and open Internet—this idea being perhaps the most innovative of them all. January 1, 1983 marks the date for the start of the Internet when all of the old hosts of the ARPAnet officially switched over to the newly-developed TCP/IP protocol. The culmination of years of work, much of the work and innovation that began in Cambridge, became one of the world's most important innovations. Sources: |
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