emergence

This page looks at the emergence of the internet. 

It covers -

• introduction
• background
• the net
• the road to normalisation
• wizards, warlords and the well

     introduction 

For a concise, intelligible and elegantly understated introduction to the web - its nature and history - you can't go past Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving The Web (London: Orion 1999), a memoir and history of the WWW by Tim Berners-Lee. For us it is more impressive than How The Web Was Born (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2000) by Robert Cailliau & James Gillies.

Janet Abbate's Inventing the Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999) is a thoughtful academic study. It builds on the under-recognised Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure (Cambridge: MIT Press 1995) edited by Abbate & Brian Kahin as part of the excellent Harvard Information Infrastructure Project. 

In contrast, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Touchstone 1998) by Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon is mid-range journalism: less detailed, much more digestible and less cute than Internet Babylon: Secrets, Scandals, and Shocks on the Information Superhighway (Berkeley: APress 2005) by Greg Holden. There is a concise account in Rita Tehan's 1999 US Congressional Research Service report on Spinning the Web: The History & Infrastructure of the Internet.

John Guice's 1998 review Looking Backward and Forward at the Internet and Patrice Flichy's 2004 The Imaginary Internet: How Utopian Fantasy Shaped the Making of a New Information Infrastructure (PDF) considered the historiography of the net and is a useful corrective to triumphalist accounts such as Sally Richards' breathless FutureNet: The Past, Present, and Future of the Internet as Told by Its Creators and Visionaries (New York: Wiley 2002).

John Naughton's A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999) is a useful overview by a UK academic. If you are new to the web it will probably be more useful than Hafner & Lyon. 

Peter Salus' Casting the Net: From Arpanet to Internet & Beyond (Reading: Addison-Wesley 1995) gives a W3 worms-eye view - complete with contemporary correspondence and draft specs - of building the Net and its precursors from the 1940s through to 1994.

     background

Rescuing Prometheus (New York: Pantheon 1998) by science historian Thomas Hughes deals with the development of digital computing and ARPANET from two perspectives: the 'military-industrial complex' and the growth of systems analysis as a way of understanding and managing. 

There is a more detailed, although less entertaining, exploration of 'thinking digital' during the 1950's and 1960's in Steve Heims' The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge: MIT Press 1991), The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2000) by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and The Closed World: Computers & the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press 1997) by Paul Edwards. Papers in Systems, Experts & Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering,World War II and After (Cambridge: MIT Press 2000) edited by Agatha Hughes and Thomas Hughes are of considerable value. 

Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon 1962-86 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1996) by Arthur Norberg & Judy O'Neill and Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993 (Cambridge: MIT Press 2002) by Alex Roland & Philip Shiman are excellent introductions to DARPA and the interaction of the military, industry and academia in developing both the net and modern computing.

It is complemented by From WHIRLWIND to MITRE: The R&D Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer (Cambridge: MIT Press 2000) by Kent Redmond & Thomas Smith. The Early History of Data Networks (Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press 1994) by Gerald Holzmann & Bjorn Pehrson explores early networks.  Insights are offered in Leo Beranek's Riding the Waves: A Life in Sound, Science and Industry (Cambridge: MIT Press 2008), a memoir by the founder of BBN.

     the net

The NSFNet project transferring the technology from the academic to the public sphere between 1987 and 1995 was a partnership involving IBM, MCI, the State of Michigan and Merit. IBM paid for router development and hardware; MCI supported the underlying connectivity.

History of the Internet: A Chronology 1843 To The Present (New York: ABC-Clio 1999) by Christos Moschovitis & Hilary Poole has a wider scope: it is a breezy history of modern telecommunications.

Netizens: On the History & Impact of Usenet & the Internet (Los Alamitos: IEEE Press 1998) by Michael & Ronda Hauben is a curious mix of serious research and zany info-lib. We suggest that you read the initial chapters and skim the deliciously silly Proposed Declaration on the Rights of Netizens.

Amateur Computerist (txt) offers an indulgent account of the netizen vision

To be a Netizen' is different from being a 'citizen'. This is because to be on the Net is to be part of a global community. To be a citizen restricts someone to a more local or geographical orientation ...

Netizens are not just anyone who comes online. Netizens are especially not people who come online for individual gain or profit. They are not people who come to the Net thinking it is a service. Rather, they are people who understand that it takes effort and action on each and everyone's part to make the Net a regenerative and vibrant community and resource

The Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) sponsor the Community Memory Project, an ongoing dialogue about internet and computing history.

Gregory Gromov's The Roads & Crossroads of Internet History site is rich but typographically manic - a fine example of why your designer should not have four paws, a bark and a wagging tail.  Online, as in print, less is more.  

For a more accessible history of the internet we instead recommend the documents on the Internet Society history page, in particular the crisp online A Brief History of the Internet by Cerf, Clark, Kahn, Lynch & others. There are succinct biographies at ibiblio.

     the road to normalisation

The evaporation of the nineties dot-com bubble during 2000 marks the end of the second age of the web. Like most communication systems or infrastructures, the web is normalising - about to become as ubiquitous and unremarkable as telephones or television.

Before looking at the individuals, institutions and companies responsible for its development we offer a snapshot of the four ages, followed by an overview of modern computing and networking. (As a point of reference there's a separate profile on past communication revolutions.)

     Wizards, Warlords and the Well

As the following pages note, computation using mechanical devices has a long and often glorious history, reaching its prime during the final third of the 19th century when companies such as National Cash Register (the future NCR) provided a basis for the corporate developments explored in James Beniger's The Control Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1986), JoAnne Yates' Control Through Communication: The Rise of System In American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1989) and Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1980).

Digital computing effectively dates from around November 1945, with commissioning of ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator & Computer), a mainframe devised by John Mauchly and Prosper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania.

ENIAC, like similar devices over the next decade, used thousands of electronic valves, weighed several tonnes and cost upwards of US$1 million. The machines were temperamental, expensive and inflexible: as a result there were fewer than 800 machines worldwide by 1957 and under 6,000 mainframes at the end of 1960, with a combined processing power equivalent to many small agencies.

High purchase/leasing costs and maintenance expenses meant that they were reserved for major academic institutions (particularly those with military affiliations) and those businesses whose large-scale corporate accounting or other finance-related needs could justify significant expenditure. Most machines were stand-alone devices, often custom-built, with limited communication capability.

Networking was slow to develop because of incompatible or non-standard hardware, data formats and software and because few users saw much value in sharing data or processing. Why share corporate accounting activity with a competitor, for example.

By 1950 the computing industry, in terms of units and sales, was dominated by the mechanical tabulator companies that had grown over the preceding one hundred years and are described in James Cortada's Before The Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created 1865-1956 (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2000). Eckert and Mauchly had left academia in 1946 to commercialise their research, resulting in what became the UNIVAC mainframe.

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation was absorbed by Remington Rand within five years, along with competitor Engineering Research Associates (ERA). Remington at that time had around 10% of the US calculator market, which was dominated by IBM (large-scale punch card-based processing using technology developed by Herman Hollerith), Burroughs and NCR.

After considerable heart-searching, IBM went electronic, leveraging its market share, superb sales force and significant military contracts. By the mid-1960s it had around 74% of the US market (and upwards of 60% of the global market) for electronic computing, tacitly setting a standard with its 360 series of compatible machines.

The first large-scale data network dates from 1958, with establishment by the US Air Force of SAGE (Semi-Automated Ground Environment): over 500,000 kilometres of telephone lines linking radar and other facilities with mainframes dedicated to warnings that the Kremlin was about to fry the land of the free.

Overviews of computing and networking in that period are provided in Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon 1962-86 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1996) by Arthur Norberg & Judy O'Neill and The Closed World: Computers & the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press 1997) by Paul Edwards; other works are highlighted on the following pages.

The first minicomputer - developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) - was released in 1959 at a cost of around US$120,000 per machine. By 1965 a comprable machine cost US$60,000, diving to US$35,000 in 1966 and US$18,000 in 1968. An indication of ongoing cost reductions is provided in William Nordhaus's 61 page The Progress of Computing (PDF), which suggests that the price of computation has fallen a trillionfold in the past 60 years: 35% per year compounded continuously, with a halving time of 2 years.

Concurrent with declining hardware costs and increasing availability of standard software (and human support), business began to network devices - linking mainframe to mainframe or tying terminals to a mainframe.

In 1964, for example, American Airlines launched its SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business-Related Environment) flight reservation system, with around 1,200 terminals and several thousand kilometres of leased lines. Two decades later the value of SABRE was significantly greater than that of AA's aircraft and its major competitors. Perspectives are provided by James McKenney's Waves of Change: Business Evolution Through Information Technology (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1995) and Alfred Chandler's Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics & Computer Industries (New York: Free Press 2001)

The internet (and its most prominent feature, the World Wide Web) began as a private network that linked a small number of institutions, primarily within the public sector.

Its use was essentially restricted to aficionados: those with a community of interest and sufficient expertise to handle what most current users of the web would consider to be unfriendly software and expensive hardware.

As a sort of private club it was largely self-administered. As discussed in the governance guide elsewhere on this site, apart from basic communication protocols there were few rules and exclusion by system operators - wizards - on behalf of the community or the institution was the ultimate sanction against misbehaviour. Some claimed that it was neither possible nor desirable for governments to regulate cyberspace, ignoring latent social concerns and practicalities such as the scope for regulating infrastructure rather than content per se.

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