Uncritical adoration

The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and development of information infrastructure. And while people may not be aware of it, we all stay on shoulder of giants. Ideas behind it are so... (I dare saying) NICE that I truly appreciate the people who made it real and self-standing network of networks.

You can see that
--commercial sphere adopts results, takes profit and gives inevitably something back
--people, new group of internauts emerged and they create new things together (believe or not, one cell does not make the brain work, but the intelligence of so many individuals has already created great works)
--and global, political implications are tremendous

Yet in this course, we will leave the philosophy to philosophers and to "philophing" librarians who never understood how Internet really works. We want to focus on the technical details, understand the Internet partly and become technologically savvy.

The technology: did you know one of the core technologies,

Packet Switching

was invented at several places independently, in England and USA! Doesn't it resemble some other things in the history of humankind? What about invention of a telephone?

It took almost 8 years since the first network of 4 computers was started, only after three years the protocols were stable enough that the smart people around Arpanet got time to develop applications, first email arrive in 1972 and become one of the most popular services of the Internet ever. Why?

Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent and heterogenous networks. No vendor, no provider should have monopoly over the network (so different from the view of telecoms and especially that of Europe in 90'). The network must have been open, bringing about open architecture networking - each network (node) acted as a peer for other networks (nodes). They cooperated.

* Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
* Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn't make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source.
* Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.
* There would be no global control at the operations level.

It happened after several years of intensive research that Internet protocol was reorganized into TCP - error checking, data flow control part and IP - addressing and transfer part (without checking), and today it is present in almost every computer operating system.

Internet had to change (can you imagine how smart must have been these people who built basis of network that is functional 20 years later?). Big changes happened in the meantime, there came a massive boom of personal computers, ethernet and together with it ever raising number of networks. Initially, computers were few, but after a while a new robust and scalable system of world-wide IP-to-address translation (DNS) must have been designed.

And here again, openness was the key to the rapid growth. The free and open access to the basic documents, especially the specifications of the protocols, allowed for massive adoption and development. And this pattern will be seen later.