Today, unlimited usage of the Internet (from the U.S.) costs less than cable TV. To understand why, one must look back to 1966, when a scientist named Bob Taylor was working at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). He was in charge of funding and overseeing the nascent field of computer research. In this role, he had to work on many different machines and communicate with researchers who also had different types of machine. "It became obvious," he said years later, "that we ought to find a way to connect all these different machines." 1 In particular, he wanted to find a way to share the country's scarce computing resources and maximize the effectiveness of the funding by having different universities specialize in different areas.
Why not try tying them altogether? By building a system of electronic links between machines, researchers doing similar work in different parts of the country could share resources and results more easily. Instead of spreading a half-dozen expensive mainframes across the country to support advanced graphics research, ARPA could concentrate resources in one or two places and build a way for everyone to get at them. 2
Thus, as a way to consolidate computing resources, a new type of network was born. ARPANET (as it came to be called) became a working network in the late 1960s. At its first large public demonstration in 1972 there were 29 nodes. Soon other networks emerged, including one among computer science research institutions (CSNET), one among IBM machines (BITNET for Because It's Time NETwork), USENET, which had become a distributed news network, and NASA's Space Physics Analysis Network (SPAN). Because these networks all used something called Internet Protocol (discussed in Section 3.1), they were often collectively referred to as the Internet. In 1985, the NSF created a high-speed backbone connecting five newly created Supercomputer Centers. This NSFNET provided crucial infrastructure for the Internet, allowing regional networks to tap into the larger, faster network that supported research institutions.
Although work had been done on distributed networks for military purposes, the ARPANET was never conceived of as military infrastructure. Its distributed design was solely for the purpose of speed and reliability for research use. "...The mainstream press... picked up the grim myth of a nuclear survival scenario and... presented it as an established truth." In fact, the project "embodied the most peaceful intentions-that researchers might share computer resources...ARAPNET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war." 3
The Internet provided a means of textual communication, such as email (electronic mail) and a way to transfer files (called ftp for file transfer protocol) but lacked easy-to-use navigational tools and any way to show images. The World Wide Web eliminated these restrictions and made the Internet accessible to the most naive of computer users. A collection of hyperlinked multimedia data stored on machines throughout the Internet, the Web is based on work done in the early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, based in Switzerland). Inspired as a way to cope with limited travel funds, it was at first strictly textual and used by physicists to share research data. In 1993, NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) released Mosaic, a free program with a graphical user interface for exploring the Web. Use of Mosaic spread quickly and commercial companies such as Netscape Communications were formed to make competing programs. As of 1997, well over 30 million Web documents (or pages) are accessible to almost anyone with a computer and a phone line, and the Web continues to grow exponentially. 4
2. Ibid., p. 10.
3. Statistics from Alta Vista at http://altavista.digital.com/
