The historical events are presented in an
informal documentary style below
Click
the image on the right for a clickable detached
timeline to view these events in chronological order
The Internet is, of
course, a global packet switched data network and the early
history of its development centres mainly on the evolotion of
packet switching technology - work on this subject happened
independently in the UK and in USA and there was also a
certain degree of sharing of ideas...
In England, at the NPL (National
Physical Laboratory) Teddington site, Dr Donald
Davies conceived the idea of a "network" of inter-connected
data terminals where the data was broken into small chunks (or
"packets" as Davies named them) rather than in a continuous
stream, which also avoided the problem of short messages being
blocked behind long messages
Davies' ideas were first presented in public
in the USA at the ACM
symposium, in Gatlinburg in 1967, and in the UK at the IFIP
Congress, 1968, in Edinburgh
The NPL packet switching approach was adopted by the US
Department of Defense in 1967 and in 1968 aproject called the ARPANET,
the forerunner of the Internet, was launched
The first ARPANET link was between the University of California
and Stanford Research Institute in 1969 and the first international ARPANET connection was made between
London and Norway in 1973
In the USA efforts to interconnect computers had been going on for
some time but had focussed on circuit switching rather than packet
switching
In 1965, two computer scientists Dr.
Lawrence G. Roberts and Thomas Marill, conducted an
experiment to understand what it would take to interconnect two
computers, namely a TX-2 computer at MIT Lincoln Lab with a Q-32
computer at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica CA,
using a lease-line from Western Union - this experiment
highlighted the complexity of the problem and concluded that
circuit switching, as used by the telephone network, was a poor
solution
Roger
Scantlebury of NPL presented at the aforementioned
Gatlinburg conference in 1967 on the local
network being developed at NPL (National Physical
Laboratory) in the UK by Donald Davies, which used much
higher speed circuits - he also saw the US plans for
ARPANET and reported back "It would appear then that the
ideas in the NPL paper at the moment are more advanced than
any proposed in the USA"
Dr Roberts was heavily influenced by the NPL work, stating
later "The NPL paper clearly impacted the ARPANET in several ways.
The name "packet" was adopted, a much higher speed was selected
(50 Kilobit/second vs 2.4 Kilobit/second) for internode lines to
reduce delay and generally the NPL analysis helped confirm the
concept of packet switching
Here is a video of Larry Roberts
(Dr.
Lawrence G. Roberts) himself talking about much of the
history described above, including talking to Donald Davies of
NPL in the UK, about using the term "packets" and faster links
(at 11:10)
The key point about the approaches taken in both
England and America was that processing power almost dictated
that seperate computer systems were used to handle the
establishment of communcations between the main computers
In the video on the right,
Leonard Kleinrock, talks about what was first probably
the message sent on a computer network on Oct. 29th, 1969, between
UCLA and Stanford University
The word
"login" was typed but the system crashed and
only "lo" was received
The first IMP had just been installed at UCLA in
Kleinrock's lab on that day in October 1969 and the first
ARPANET communication was established between with Douglas
Engelbart's lab at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), as the
commemorated by the UCLA Office of Public Information below
By December 1969, the fledgling ARPANET had grown
to 4 nodes, with the connection of the University of California
at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah
In 1972 the second phase of ARPANET
produced a major expansion from the 4 original sites to 40 sites
across the USA
In 1972 ARPA was renamed the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency) in 1972 - there is an interesting section
in RFC 1000,
which summarises RFCs 1 to 999, which starts:
The procurement of the ARPANET was initiated in the
summer of 1968 -- Remember Vietnam, flower children, etc?
There had been prior experiments at various ARPA sites to link
together computer systems, but this was the first version to
explore packet-switching on a grand scale. ("ARPA" didn't
become "DARPA" until 1972.)
In 1973
University College of London in England (UCL) and the Royal
Radar Establishment in Norway were connect to ARPANET and in
1975 satellite links to Hawaii and UK
were added and there were already 57
nodes in the network - that year the Defense
Communication Agency (DCA) took over direct control of
ARPANET, as there was risk to national security because of rapid
growth and complete lack of control over access and activity
This document from MIT in 1965 covers the MAIL Command on the CTSS (Compatible
Time-Sharing System)
In 1969 this early electronic mail system was also ported to Mulics
(Multiplexed
Information and Computing Service)
An electronic mail box protocol was
also discussed in various RFCs from RFC 196 to RF720 from 1971 andin 1976 Queen Elizabeth II made
history by sending an electronic mail announcing that the
Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern was available
on the ARPANET and by this time
the familar format of "name@host" was in already in use
The video on the
left, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of ARPANET shows its
evolution during the 1970s and the interntetworking between
various elements, which is also covered below
Robert Kahn
of BBN also explains the network topology and resilience, with the
aid of diagrams drawn on a whiteboard - he is very probably the
industry's very first SE (Systems or Sales Engineer) - he goes on
to detail such familar topics as store & forward devices,
network management, remote admin and code upgrades
As Robert Kahn explains, the IMP
(Interface
Message Processors) used to form the ARPANET were
also suplemented by TIPs (Terminal Interface Processors),
which allowed connection of simpler terminals and were therfore
early terminal servers
Peter
T. Kirstein in England is often recognised as the
father of the European Internet as he was responsible for the
first ARPANET connected system outside of America
The British side of the story is remembered by members of the
original NPL (National Physical Laboratory) team in this video
The comparison with visiting ARPANET people from
America is mentioned and the connection of the NPL network with
it - most likely the first example of InterNetworking
Even an example of a data network carrying
encoded speech is explained - probably the first example of VOIP
in the 1970s
This diagram of the ARPANET protocols shows a
multi-layered approach, much like the OSI 7 layer model and
TCP/IP 5 layer model, which it obviously predates by many years,
albeit with only 3 layers
IMPs are interconnected at the first layer with
physical circuits and communicate via packets
Hosts are interconnected at the second layer with
virtual links and commicate via messages
Users processes are interconnected at the third
layer with virtual connections and communicate via byte streams
The ARPANET host-to-host communication used 1822 protocol, as
covered in the specification document on the left, along with
hardware and interfacing details
Data messages contained the destination host's address and the
data message being sent and the 1822 hardware interface allowed
the IMP to deliver the message to that destination address, either
to a locally connected host, or to a downstream IMP the last IMP
in the path transmitted a Ready for Next Message (RFNM)
acknowledgement to the sending host IMP.
Messages had a total length of 8159 bits, the first 96 bits were
reserved for the "leader", or header, and the remainder was data
1822 messages had guaranteed delivery and if a message did
fail to be delivered, the IMP sent to the originating host a
message informing it as such - this system proved not to be
foolproof though
Later versions of the 1822 protocol, such as 1822L, are described
in RFC 802 and
its successors
Stephen D.
Crocker, a graduate student at UCLA, created and led the Network
Working Group (NWG) and wrote the very first Network
Working Group Request for Comment (RFC) which
summaried the IMP Software, the Host-to-Host Software and the Host
Software - Click the image on the right for the original copy
RFC 2 explained how to write RFCs and added that the Network
Working Group "seems to consist of Steve Carr of Utah, Jeff
Rulifson and Bill Duvall at SRI, and Steve Crocker and Gerard
Deloche at UCLA. Membership is not closed"
The problem with unreliable message delivery on the ARPANET
was addressed with the Network Control Program (NCP), which
provided a standard method to establish reliable,
flow-controlled, bidirectional communications links among
different processes in different host computers
The NCP interface allowed application software to connect across
the ARPANET by implementing higher-level communication protocols,
an early example of the protocol layering concept later
incorporated in the OSI model
NCP was developed under the leadership of a graduate student at
UCLA, Stephen
D. Crocker
Crocker created and led the Network Working Group (NWG)
which was made up of a collection of graduate students at
universities and research laboratories sponsored by ARPA to carry
out the development of the ARPANET software for the host computers
RFC 384
lists all the OFFICIAL SITE IDENTS FOR ORGANIZATIONS IN THE ARPA
NETWORK in August 1972- it only amounts
to 4 pages
The ARPANET Completion Report on the right describes much of the
history covered above and also has more diagrams showing its growth
in the glossary at the end
In 1980 the whole ARPANET came to a complete halt because of a
message timestamp issue, which mimicked a DDoS attack - the
details were recorded in RFC 789
- at that time ARPANET had 213 hosts, with a new host added
approximately once every 20 days
The NCP protocol had some critical limitations:
Inability to address hosts and networks further downstream
than a destination IMP on the ARPANET
Lack of end-to-end host error control, meaning packet loss
causing protcol and and application crashes
Error control was never deemed necessary for the ARPANET as it was
designed as the only
network in existence
As changes in the ARPANET were ruled out, it was clear that new
protocol to replace NCP would be required - the new protocol would
need to operate more like a communications protocol, rather than a
device driver orientated approach that NCP took In 1974 Vinton Cerf
and Bob
Kahn wrote the paper on the left detailing a new
protocol called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), to correct
all of the shortcomings of NCP by itself
This early TCP implementation worked well with file transfer and
remote login but problems emerged with packet voice
experimentation in the 1970s, which showed that packet loss would
be better corrected by the application, outside of TCP
The answer was to split all of the functions of the original TCP
into two protocols and in 1978 TCP was split into:
A simple internetworking protocol to provide only packet
addressing and forwarding
An advanced protocol providing flow control and packet loss
recovery
These protocols, namely Internet Protocol (IP)
andTransmission Control Protocol (TCP) were combined into a
protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP for ARPANET
By 1983 the DCA (Defense Communication Agency) and DARPA
had made the historic move to establish these two new
protocols as de facto for the ARPANET - The Department
of Defence (DoD) also adopted TCP/IP and the paper on the
right by Vint Cerf and Edward Cain describes the
implementation within the DoD
Peter
T. Kirstein was instrumental in defining and
implementing TCP/IP alongside Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn
Vint Cerf himself describes his
work and collaboration with all others invloved in this
video, including the TCP and TCP/IP protocols He also covers need for interworking, stemming from
the decision to allow seperate networks, with "Gateways"between
them, which would later be renamed "Routers"
There was a period in the industry of what has been termed the Protocol Wars,
which saw great debate over which protocols and standards should
be used for computer networks and the Internet
IBM had previously produced the Systems
Network Architecture (SNA) in 1974 and Digital Equipment
Coropration (DEC) had released DECnet in 1975,
which both competed with TCP/IP
The OSI model is a conceptual 7 layer framework for network
communications which is still referred to for the Internet, home and
enterpise networks
The OSI and the 7 Layer Model actually lost the Protocol Wars
though and TCP/IP became the de facto choice for networks small
and large worldwide
TCP/IP defines 4 layers, as above, but it
practice 5 layers are involved when the physical layer (copper
cabling, optic fobre, wireless radio etc.) is included
As can be seen above, there is no distiction bewteen OSI Layer 5,
Layer 6
or Layer7
(Session, Presentation and Application) and they are all generally
in thw OSI Application layer 7 on all current IP networks,
including the Internet
The diagram on the right shows how packets, or "frames" at the
physical layer are encapsulated for Internet web page browsing,
with no action taken above the 5th later, as expected for TCP/IP
RFC1122
published in 1989 covers "the communication protocol layers:
link layer, IP layer, and transport layer" and the companion RFC1123
details covers requirements for application layer protocols -
a total of 5 layers with physical/link layer included
TCP/IP Application Layer 7 maps to the
OSI Application layer 7, Presentation Layer 6 and most
of the Session Layer 5
TCP/IP Transport Layer 4 maps to the
graceful close function of the OSI Session Layer 5 as
well as the OSI Transport Layer 4
TCP/IP Internet Layer 3 performs
functions as those in a subset of the OSI Network Layer
3
TCP/IP
Link Layer 2 corresponds to the OSI Data Link Layer 2
and may include similar functions in the OSI Physical
Layer 1 and some protocols of OSI Network Layer 3
IT documentation and exams very often still place various
protocols in current use in home/commercial networks and the
Internet into the unused OSI layers 5 and 6 - there is, perhaps,
some merit in putting protocols like TLS
or SSL
in some form of Layer 5 and/or Layer 6, as they use further
encapsulation of Layer 4 Segments but they certainly do not fit
well into OSI Layer 5 or 6
As the ARPANET continued to grew, the need for
internetworking heightened, which is illustrated well
by the diagram on the right, which shows how ARPANET
and MILNET interconnected
The ARPANET served the academic research community and
MILNET carried unclassified traffic for United States
Department of Defense and Gateways relayed electronic
mail between the two networks
MILNET was physically separated in 1983
SATNET, or the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network as it was
also known, was an early satellite network that was an important part of the first
heterogeneous computer network and the fledgling Internet
As the diagrams on the left and below show, SATNET was an
international link across the Atlantic Ocean to England and
mainland Europe, which used the Intelsat IV
and Intelsat
V geostationary communication satellite
Goonhilly, in
Helston, Cornwall provided the satellite link from the UK and,
surprisingly, a mobile van from Stanford Research Institute, as
part of PRNET
(Packet Radio Network)
The SRI van looked much like a bread van but was actually a full
ARPANET node, equipped with a DEC LSI-11, packet radio kit, a
shielded generator and air conditioning
In 1976 on the 27th of August, the van was parked next to a
well-known Portola Valley, California biker bar called Rossotti's
(now the Alpine Inn),
with cables running to a picnic tables and it was then that first
two-network TCP/IP transmission was conducted between the van and
ARPANET
The first demonstration, linking SATNET, the ARPANET, and PRNET took place on
the 22nd of November 1977, when data flowed through the mobile SRI
van at Menlo Park, California and the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles via London, England, across three
different types of network: packet radio, satellite, and the
ARPANET, thus demonstarting the first Internet transmission between
three disparate networks.
From 1977 to 1978, the SRI van was also used for the first VOIP
(Voice over IP) tests, using ARPA's Network Speech Compression
Program, over the Mickey Mouse phone in the van
The video on the left Robert Kahn talks about various parts of
ARPANET, including IMPs, packet radio and the invention of
gateways, which eventually became "routers" in the Internet
The report below details testing conducted on
SATNET in 1988 for TCP throughput perfomance, round trip, packet
loss etc. as well as its structure
TheInternet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) was formed in 1986
from the previous Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures (GADS) Task
Force, to oversee standards for the Internet, including RFCs and
all technical standards for TCP/IP
By November of 1983 the size of the ARPA
Internet was causing huge problems with maintaining records of
IP addresses, which was done essentially manually, with hosts
being entered in a global table, the HOSTS.TXT file, on the
Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI - this approach was
not able to scale any further though and this manual booking was
at the limit of its capabilities and a distributed database, rater
than a centralised one, was needed
.
A working group including Jon Postel
(who hither to had done much of the maual address admin), Paul
Mockapetris and Craig Partrige was set up to solve the issue
and they duly published RFC 882
which furthered the work on name servers in RFC 819 and
created the
This naming service meant that end sers could now use host names,
such as USC-ISIF, instead of IP addresses, such as 10.2.0.52
The very first DNS server was called "Jeeves" and was brought
online in 1983-84, when the Internet had something over 1000
hosts, by Paul Mockapetris on DEC Tops-20 machines at the
University of Southern California’s Information Sciences
Institute (USC-ISI) and SRI International’s Network Information
Center (SRI-NIC) - in 1984 RFC 920
was published and the Domain Names System (DNS) was named and the
full service came into operation
Using a grant from DARPA, another DNS server was written in 1986
on the Unix operating system by graduate students at the
University of California at Berkeley - this was the Berkeley Internet Name
Domain (BIND)
Jon Postel passed away, his obituary was wriiten by Vint Cerf and
published as RFC
2468 entitled "I REMEMBER IANA", a reference to to IANA the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority,
it rememebers John as the first person to carry out these services
personally, it begins "A long time ago, in a network, far far
away, a great adventure took place!"
Network deployments gathered pace in the 1980s and proprietary
mail systems, such Unix
Mail gained usage, along with X.400
based systems
Until the early 1990s, it looked like these systems of a part
of the Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP)
would become the de facto system of electronic mail
The adoption of TCP/IP on the Internet saw Simple
Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol implemented on
the ARPANET in 1983
NSFNET
began with 56-kbps links, which were upgraded to T1 (1.544 Mbps)
links in 1989.
The growing size of the Internet started to pose
issues for the selection of routes taken by data packets in end to
end flows across the entirety of its reach, as depicted below
right, and also the best protcol for sharing this routing
information (at Layer 3 of the TCP/IP model)
Routing at this early phase of the Internet was carried out by just
a few Gateways (later to be called Routers at the networks core -
these held tables of complete Layer 3 network reachability of the
entire Internet
The core Internet routers exchanged information with Gateway-to-Gateway
Protocol (GGP), which was descibed by RFC 823 on
the DARPA Internet Gateway, written by BBN and published in 1982
GGP used a distance vector algorithm, based on the Bellman-Ford
Algorithm, for best route selection, which only uses a count
of the number of gateways/routers to traverse, or hops, as they are
called, with out any information on the speed or latency/delay on
the interconnecting links - none of the gateways or links were very
fast at this time though, so the hop count worked as a viable metric
RFC 827 ,
also written by BBN in 1982 as a draft, described the Exterior
Gateway Protocol EGP and states "In the future, the
internet is expected to evolve into a set of separate domains or
"autonomous systems" - RFC 904
Exterior Gateway Protocol Formal Specification was published in
1984, as the formal specification for EGP as the protocol for
reachability information exchange between Autonomous Systems of
gateways
EGP still used a simple distance vector algoritm and only catered
for only a single path between any two end points on the
network, with its tree based network topology - this was of little
consequence at the time though, with NSFNET acting as the single
“backbone” handling all long distance traffic - EGP furthered the
definition of “Autonomous Systems” by introdudicng AS Numbers
for each individual network running EGP
RFC 1009
Requirements for Internet Gateways was published in 1987 and
defined LANs, WANs, as detailed below, Autonomous Systems which
are under under the control of a single operations and maintenance
(O&M) organisation and employ common routing protocols
Local-Area Networks (LANs) - LANs may have a variety
of designs, typically based upon buss, ring, or star
topologies. In general, a LAN will cover a small geographical
area (e.g., a single building or plant site) and provide high
bandwidth with low delays
Wide-Area Networks (WANs) - Geographically-dispersed
hosts and LANs are interconnected by wide-area networks, also
called long-haul networks. These networks may have a complex
internal structure of lines and packet-routers (typified by
ARPANET), or they may be as simple as point-to-point lines
Xerox Palo
Alto Research Centre (PARC) produced many key advances in
computing technology, including the GUI (Graphic
User Interface) which formed the basis for Apple Computers and
Microsoft Windows
These features appeared on the first "desk top" computer, the Xerox Alto, as
in the image below - these systems were also connected together
by an intercommunicating LAN, developed from 1973 to 1974
Robert
Metcalfe had studied ALOHAnet radio
network which connected the campuses of the University of Hawaii, as
part of his PhD dissertation and, having been inspired by its Carrier
Sense Multiple Acces (CSMA), he wrote the memo on the right in
1973 proposing a similar network using coaxial cable network as the
transmission medium - click
the image for the full memo
Metcalfe proposed the name "ETHER NETWORK", after the
luminiferous aether once postulated to exist as the transport
medium for electromagnetic waves in space, such as radio waves
Bob Metcalfe himself talks about the new Ethernet network in detail
in the video below - he also mentiones that the ARPANET "long haul"
network was available to all the Alto workstations on the Ethernet
The second part of the video (from 58:30) shows how the use of Slot Time,
collision detection and back off
Xerox filed a patent for Ethernet
in 1975, with Metcalfe, David Boggs, Chuck Thacker, and Butler
Lampson as inventors
Metcalfe's image below, showing the basics of
the Ethernet coxaxial cable and associated transceiver and
contoller interface cable, has become quite famous
One of the early Ethernet transceivers, actually for a Dorado
workstation, is shown on the left, in front of the sign for Palo
Alto Research Centre (PARC)
The paper on the right gives full technical details on the
Ethernet and also shows how the specifications evolved from the
experimental version in 1972 to the first version released
to the market, Ethernet Version 1, in 1980
The data rate rose from under 3 Mbs to 10 Mbs and maximum end to
end network length rose from 1km to 2.5km - Manchester encoding
was retained but interestingly moving from positive signalling on
75ohm coaxial cable to negative signalling on 50ohm coaxial cable
Presumably to decrease issues discovered, the packet format, the
preamble was increased from 1 bit to 64 bits, the CRC from 16 bits
to 32 bits and the address from 8 bits to 48 bits - this last
point increasing the maximum number of addressable hosts from 256
to something over 2.8 trillion but in practise the maximum number
of stations was limited by collisons to 1024
The image on the left shows the components of the PARC
Experimental Ethernet, with the black 75ohm coax, white
transceiver and controller cable (later called an AUI
cable) in grey
The PARC
Universal Packet (PUP) protocol was initially used on the
local parts of the network, which was the experimental version of
Ethernet with a data rate under 3 megabits/second - click here for
the PUP
Internetwork Architecture document
MIT also developed their own network technology Chaosnet in
1975, which was highly influenced by the experimental Ethernet but
ran over 75 ohm cable TV coax, with token passing to avoid
collisions - click here for the MIT
Chaosnet documentation
Datapoint developed ARCNET in 1976,
which was a a star-wired bus network using 93 ohm RG-62/U coaxial
cable - click here for the ARCNET
documentation
Cambridge University also produced a succesful ring network, the Cambridge
Ring in 1974, which ran over twisted pair cabling - click
here for Acorn Computers Cambride
Ring documentation and two researchers at IBM Zurich
Research Laboratory. Werner Bux and Hans Müller, began development
work on IBM Token
Ring networks
Ethernet Version 1 and subsequent Ethernet Version 2 frame format
is shown below
The Ethernet Version 1.0, or "The Ethernet, A
Local Area Network. Data Link Layer and Physical Layer
Specifications", were published after Bob Metcalfe left Xerox 1979
and he promoted Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Intel, and
Xerox to jointly produce an Ethernet standard.
Xerox relinquished their ownership of the 'Ethernet' trademark
and the DIX standard (Digital Intel Xerox) of Version 1.0
specified 10 Mbps data rate, 48-bit destination and source
addresses and a 16-bit Ethertype field, as sgown above
The Ethernet Version 1.0 was commonly called the
"Blue Book", as the image shows but the Ethernet Version 2.0 book
actually was coloured blue, as on the right
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(IEEE) began working on their project 802 for LAN standards in
1980 and the DIX "Blue Book" was provided for CSMA/CD Ethernet
but IBM also promoted the competing Token Ring
approach, furthering the work done on the Cambridge Ring and also
General Motors proposed a Token Bus design - ARCnet
Early work at MIT led to the 1981, Proteon 10 Mbit/s ProNet-10
token ring network.
In 1981, workstation vendor Apollo Computer introduced their
proprietary 12 Mbit/s Apollo token ring (ATR) network running over
75 ohm RG-6U coaxial cabling.
On October 15 1985, IBM launched their own proprietary IBM Token
Ring products. It ran at 4 Mbit/s, and attachment was possible
from IBM PCs, midrange computers and mainframes. It used a
convenient star-wired physical topology, and ran over shielded
twisted-pair cabling - and shortly became the basis for the
(ANSI)/IEEE standard 802.5.
In 1988 the faster 16 Mbit/s token ring was standardized by the
802.5 working group
Pressure from Metcalfe, by then at his newly formed company 3com,
Xerox ans Siemens accelerated support for Ethernet with a Local
Networks group at the European standards body the ECMA TC24 and
as the DIX standards were already almost technically complete,
the IEEE 802.3
CSMA/CD standard was approved in December 1982, published as a
draft in 1983 and as a standard in 1985
The frame format speciied by the 802.3 standard changed the 2 byte
Ethertype field to a Length field, added a DSAP (Destination Service
Access Point), SSAP (Source Service Access Point) and the Control
field, which are concerned with Logical Link
Control (LLC)
Local Area Networks (LANs) based on the IEEE 802.3 standard were
widely deployed on university campuses and in company premises in
the mid to late 1980s, while the IEEE also published their 802.5
standard for Token Ring and this technology was also adopted
The photos above and on the right show IEEE 802.3 Ethernet
transceivers and their "Vampire" or " Bee-Sting" taps into the
large diameter yellow "Thicknet" 10Base5 coaxial cable - the IEEE
nomenclature of Data Rate (10) Mbps-(Base)band/Broadband-500
(metre Segment Length)
For more technical details of Ethernet deployments of the 1980s, see
the Ethernet
Course I gave to engineers at the time
The Stanford
University Network campus network, referred to as SUN (later
SUNet), was to play an important role in the development of gateways
and Layer 3 routing technology - Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC)
had donated quipment including Xerox Alto computers, a laser
printer, and file server connected by Ethernet local area network
technology to SUNet in 1979 and this provided an ideal environment
for technology development
The SUN main campus network, connecting university departments and
many, originally used the 3 Mbps experimental version of Ethernt and
PARC Universal Packet protocol (PUP) and connection to the ARPANET
was provided by a router based on a Digital Equipment Corporation
(DEC) PDP-11 computer running software from MIT
The TCP/IP protocol upake through the 1980s promoted the
migration of SUN to TCP/IP and in 1981 students and staff at
Stanford, including one Leonard
Bosack, designed an produced a device called the Blue
Box, as seen on the right, to allow all university's computer
systems intercommunicate by acting as a multiprotocol router - the
electronics hardware of the Blue Box was designed by Andy
Bechtolsheim, a Stanford graduate student, and the
software was written by William
Yeager
Bechtolsheim had produced a SUN workstation in 1980, based on
the Alto but with a Multibus
backplane, which allowed the use of experimental Ethernet interface
boards, or commercial 10 Ethernet interface boards from companies
like Bob Metcalfe's 3Com
Something like 24 Blue Boxes were used all over the Stanford campus,
including in the computer science department, which was run by
Bosack, and the Graduate School of Business Computer Facilities,
which where run by his wife, Sandy Lerner
William Yeager's router software, Network Operating System (NOS),
was written in C, which allowed additional network interfaces and
protocol features to be easily added
The Blue Box and NOS were to form the basis for products from the
new company, cisco (later capitalised to Cisco), formed by
Leonard Bosack and his wife, Sandy Lerner in late 1984
The video on the right covers the early collaboration of Bosack and
Lerner, when they "pulled wires through manholes"
Bosack and Kirk Lougheed, who was a Stanford University
employee at the time and is employed at Cisco to this day, began
to interconnect the Stanford campus in 1985, using an adaptation
of William Yeager's software, despite his assertion that
permission to use Blue Box technology commercially had been denied
Bosack and Lougheed were forced to resign from Stanford in
1986, with the university considering legal complaints against the
Cisco founders for theft of intellectual property, software
and hardware designs - but in 1987 Stanford decided to allow
licensing of the router software and two computer boards to Cisco
The first Cisco product released in 1985 was the MEIS
(Massbus-Ethernet Interface Subsystem), which interconnected DEC
mainframes but their first router product was the AGS (Advanced
Gateway Server) as seen left and below, released in 1986
This multiprotocol routing capability of the Cisco Network Operating
System (NOS), which originated from the Blue Box and William
Yeager's C code, was the distinguishing factor of Cisco early
products
By the kate 1980s the Internet had grown to an extent where the
number of routers was creating problems for the EGP routing protocol
and this was discussed at the 12th IETF meeting in Austin, Texas in
1989
Kirk Lougheed of Cisco and Yakov Rekhter of IBM sat together at
lunch in the cafeteria and sketched their ideas on a replacment
for EGP on three "ketchup stained napkins" - their sketches formed
the basis for Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is still known
as the "three napkin protocol"
RFC 1105 on
BGP was published by Rekhter and Lougheed in 1989 and the protocol
was intorduced on the Internet in 1994
.
There is some dispute in the industry on whether there were 2 or 3
original napkins on which the BGP design was sketched but in the
video on the right, Yakov Roekter himself conforms that there were
three
On the left photocopies of the three napkins are displayed in the
routing protocol development area at Cisco Systems in Santa Clara,
CA
By 1991 NSFNET had been upgraded to T3 (44.736 Mbps)
interconnections and the NSF also promoted local organisations to
provide local connections for educational and NSF funded sites -
thus forming the first ISPs (Internet Service Providers)
In 1991 the NSF changed its policy on non-commercial use by allowing
the ANSNet,
which was the upgraded NSFNET Backbone Service, to carry commercial
traffic for Network, IBM, and MCI
While testing was originally done in the Washington, DC area,
commercial operations began at a PSInet facility in Santa Clara,
California in the Fall of 1991.[4] In April 1996, the CIX router
moved to a more neutral site in Palo Alto, California, the Palo Alto
Internet eXchange.[4]
The NSFNET continued to grow and provide connectivity between both
NSF-funded and non-NSF regional networks, eventually becoming the
backbone that we know today as the Internet. Although early NSFNET
applications were largely multiprotocol in nature, TCP/IP was
employed for interconnectivity (with the ultimate goal of migration
to a standardized Open Systems Interconnection [OSI] set of
standards — that never appeared).
In 1993, the NSF decided that it did not want to be in the business
of running and funding networks, but wanted instead to go back to
the funding of research in the areas of supercomputing and
high-speed communications. In addition, there was increased pressure
to commercialize the Internet; in 1989, a trial gateway connected
MCI, CompuServe, and Internet mail services, and commercial users
were now finding out about all of the capabilities of the Internet
that once belonged exclusively to academic and hard-core users!
1991WAIS, invented by Brewster
Kahle, is released by Thinking Machines Corporation.Gopher is introduced by Paul
Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the University of Minnesota.
1993 – WWW invented
World-Wide
Web (WWW) is released by CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.British researcher, Tim
Berner-Lee creates HTMLThe web as we know it is born!
The growth in the number of websites on the Internet has been
truly phenomenal, of course, with the total now well over 1.8
Billion
As the chart on the left shows, from 1991 to 1992, the total only
grew to 10 sites and then only to 130 sites by 1993 - but from
1994 exponential growth produced 1 Million sites by 1997 and 17
Million by 2000
The graph below shows the huge growth in sites from 17 Million
in 2000 to over 200 Million in 2010 and to 1.88 Billion in 2021,
along with the arrival of familar sites like Google, facebook,
YouTube and Instagram
It is a long time since the very early days of the Internet,
when the minimal number of new users appearing on Usenet and BBS
Bulletin Board Systems with each university intake were
lamented, naming it the Eternal
September and the Tshirt on the left appeared
The Internet has also evolved, in its usage at least, greatly
since The WELL,
or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, was probably the first
virtual community
Formed in 1985 The WELL predated Myspace, facebook, YouTube abd
Instagram by almost two decades
... And finally, a mention of the term Cyberspace
which is now linked closely with the Internet, which actually
originates from the 1984 book Neuromancer
that describes
"a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions
of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being
taught mathematical concepts... A graphical representation of
data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human
system"
As a fitting end to this page, it seems appropriate:
to requote Vint Cerf from RFC 2468:
"A long time ago, in a network, far far away, a
great adventure took place!"....
Meet the Author - John A. Clark
My journey with computer netorks started in the eralry 1980s when
worked on early LAN systems from Altos Computer Systems based on
RS422 and ealry hardware based S-Net star networks from Novell - click
here for details
By the mid 80s I often worked on UUCP file sharing but in 1986
I installed TCP/IP at the London Stock Exchange (only around 2
or 3 years after it was adopted by ARPANET) - click
here for the details
I went on to teach Ethernet and TCP/IP to
engineers in the late 1980s and 1990s click
here for more
As the annotations say on the graph, I wrote my first homepage in
pure HTML in 1994, when they were only around 3,000 sites on the
Internet and only a mere handful of personal/business sites and
yes, before that I wrote my resignation on an HMTL page, which was
browsable from all company employees internally
I actually started writing this very Internet History page in
about 1997 and for many, many years it was left and was only
finished in 2024! Click
here to see the very sparse draft that remained
totally unchanged for over 25 years!!
My first fully online multimedia webpage was run from a desktop at
my office in Slough, UK - its worlwide presence was proved
when I accessed it from the California at the HQ of Bay
Networks (slow to load), while I attended a networks
conference - Making 1995 the first time I saw a page from
England appear on a screen in USA.. the Internet was truly an
international phenomena!
I moved into
Pre-Sales/Technical Account Management in 1995 and spent many
years working for leading networking Silicon Valley vendors,
including Brocade, Foundry Networks, Nortel Networks and Bay
Networks, during which was perhaps the "Golden Period" of
networking, both in terms of techical advances and sales budgets
Over the nexy 20 years I saw Ethernet
increase bandwidth from 10 Mbps to 100 Gbps, implemented
Token Ring, FDDI and ATM
LANs, migrated LANs and WANs to the then new OSPF routing
protocol, wrote papers on and rolled out IP
QoS, VoIP/IP Telephony, Mulicast and IP load balancing,
worked with MPLS and BGP peering for Service Providers and later
TRILL based Ethernet Fabrics and BGP IP Fabrics - click the CV
image for full details
Probably my most notable project was acting as
the vendor design authority for the HSBC
New HQ in Canary Wharf