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 1957, Dr. J.C.R. Licklider left MIT to join Bolt Beranek and Newnan (BBN Technologies), where he advanced the state of many basic ideas, especially the BBN Time-Sharing System

In 1959, a computer scientist, Paul Baran, was working at the RAND Corporation on the idea of interconnecting computers. In 1962, Baran presented a paper titled On Distributed Communications Networks he proposed the computer communication concept of standard message blocks routed as "hot potatoes" in a store-and-forward system









In 1961 Leonard Kleinrock wrote a proposal for his thesis at MIT on "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" and in 1962 "Message Delay in Communication Nets with Storage" both of which described short message data techniques

In 1962, when Dr Licklider became the first Director of the IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office) of the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), he promoted the development of time-sharing one computer at the same time and
in 1963 he proposed an even grander vision: an "Intergalactic Network" of thousands of computers, millions of computers...




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


In 1968 Dr Roberts beame the program manager for ARPANET and Wesley Clark suggested the use of dedicated computers in a message switching network, which were later called Interface Message Processors (IMPs)

The IMPs together with the telephone lines and the modems would constitute the message-switching, communications network, or "Subnet
"






Dr Roberts presented a paper titled Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communications at the ACM symposium, in Gatlinburg in 1967, which he down-played slow speed circuits but stated  that the communication links between IMPs would be 2400 bit/second dial-up circuits

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

These
Interface Message Processors (IMPs) were manufactured by  Bolt Beranek and Newnan (BBN Technologies) and were based on Honywell DDP-516 systems, with a different front panel and 6,000 words of code written by the "IMP Guys" at BBN in Honeywell 516 assembly language



















The interface message processor for the ARPA computer network document on the right was written by several BBN employees, such as Robert Kahn, F.E. Heart, S.M. Ornstein, W.R. Crowther, and D.C. Walden

J.M. McQuillan, W.R. Crowther, B.P. Cosell, D.C. Walden, and F.E. Heart also wrote Improvements in the Design and Performance of the ARPA Network













J.M. McQuillan and  D.C. Walden also wrote ARPA Network Design Decisions on the left

















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 and in 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







By 1977 ARPANET has grown as depicted below



































Key contributors mentioned earlier, such as J.C.R. Licklider, Lawrence G. Roberts and Donald Davies appear in the video on the left explaining the operation of ARPANET and the design techniques used by BBN Technologies  

 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

Kirstein recalls his early work in Early Experiences with the ARPANET and INTERNET in the UK











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







NCP was discussed in An Official Protocol Proffering RFC 54 and it was finalised and deployed in December 1970, with its Prototypical Implemenatation is described in RFC 55

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:
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:
  1. A simple internetworking protocol to provide only packet addressing and forwarding
  2. 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 

In 1976 the ITU (International Telecommunication Union), then called the CCITT, published the X.25 standard in the Orange Book, which covered packet switching over PTT public telephone Wide Area Networks (WANs)



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
 

In 1980 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defined the Open Syetems Interconnection Basic Reference Model in ISO/EIC 7488-1 which defined the Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model)  as seen below left










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

Click here for the original X.226 OSI Layer 6 Protocol and the X.215 OSI Layer 5 Protocol neither of which were ever taken up on 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

Comparing the TCP/IP model with the OSI model brings thw following obervations:

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













The Internet 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

Robert Kahn also formed the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in 1986, to support the IETF






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

















The National Science Foundation (NSF) formed the National Science Foundation Network in 1981 to interconnect super computing centres, following on from the CSNET , the Computer Science Network  

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




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's also wrote a paper in 1973 on Packet Communication for MIT

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 transceiver and contoller used Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMA/CD), an enhancement to CSMA used on ALOHAnet, to detect transmission collisions from more than one host and used a truncated exponential backoff algorithm to avoid subsequent collisions


Robert Metcalfe and David Bogg's 1976 article on Distributed Packet Switching covers much of the technical efficiencies of Ethernet









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 standards publications for Ethernet Version 1.0  from 1980 on the left and Ethernet Version 2.0 of 1982 on the right - Click the images for full versions
 
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

Proteon  - work at MIT  - click here for the Apollo Token Ring documentation

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)


Click here for the tech data sheet for Belden 9880 Thicknet cable

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













The AGS could route TCP/IP, X.25,  DECnet, XNS and Chaosnet concurrently, as well as supporting IGRP (Interior Gateway Routing Protocol), RIP (Routing Information Protocol) and EGP for dynamically sharing routing information, as detailed in Systems Gateway Servers Manual  the AGS Service Manual

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












NSFNET was not intended to be an interconnection mechanism but meetings in mid-1991 in Reston, Virginia between PSINet, UUNET and CERFnet led to the formation of  the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) - thus forming the first Internet Exchange Point (IXP)

The CIX promoted commercial Internet backbone services and non-NSF ISPs pressured them to open the backbone to all

PSINET was












1991: BGP, 2 and 3



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!




































Tier 1 Service Providers 



Internet Exchange Points     London Internet Exchange  






1994: BGP-4

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 decade









... 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



Click here to view my homepage in 1994, with links to the then existing websites now preserved on the WayBackMachine, the Internet Archive

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!

Click here for the archive of my early web homepages - if the Nickname "Nobby" is confusing, click here for an explanation


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





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