Computer Networking Bradley Newton Due date: 9/8/2019 9/25/2019

Summary: ​ The journal article, “Brief History of the Internet” follows the growth of the Internet from its origins to its eventual commercialization. The article ends by talking about ways the Internet might change in the future and about new technologies it will grow to accommodate (from the perspective of 1997). The two major points of origin for the Internet were J.C.R. Licklider’s idea of social interaction of multiple parties through networking – being coined as a “Galactic Network” – and ’s paper on packet switching theory. Led by MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, MIT took the idea of packet switching to DARPA to develop the concept. Eventually ARPANET was developed, with packet switching ideas from NPL and RAND. The Network Measurement Center at UCLA was chosen to be the first node of the ARPANET, and was eventually followed by SRI, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. Another one of the Internet’s tenets was the idea of open-architecture, where the Internet is composed of separately designed and developed networks for different needs. Along with this concept, a communications protocol was needed to effectively and reliably communicate between machines of different operating systems, which led to the development of TCP/IP under . TCP/IP was built on the need for a communications protocol that would allow every network to stand on its own and require no internal changes to connect to the Internet, and communication would be done on a “best effort” basis that provided end-end error control and the requirement that lost packets would be retransmitted from the source. TCP was initially implemented for large time sharing systems such as Tenex and TOPS 20, but was shown to be capable of being tailored down for PCs by David Clark at MIT. The widespread development of LANs, PCs, and workstations led to changing needs in how networks were managed, which led to the development of DNS to help manage the huge growth in the number of connected hosts (CIDR also helped to reduce the size of address tables). Increase in the number of hosts on the Internet also called for updated protocols in terms of managing packet traffic, which IGP was built to help remedy. Internet technology was being heavily experimented with and validated by its use by entities such as the US Department of Energy (MFENet for researchers in Magnetic Fusion Energy, HEPNet for research in High Energy physics), NASA (SPAN), AT&T (USENET). Other networks were also developed by people such as Rick Adrion, David Farber, and Larry Landweber for the academic and industrial Computer Science community (funded initially by the US National Science Foundation) and Ira Fuchs and Greydon Freeman who created BITNET. The fast paced growth of the Internet was due partially to the free and open access to the documents that outlined its specifications and protocols. ARPANET’s beginning in an academic, university community cemented the tradition of open publication of ideas and results. Eventually a quicker form of documentation was created in the form of RFCs, which were meant to “create a positive feedback loop, with ideas or proposals presented in one RFC triggering another RFC with additional ideas and so on.” On top of easily accessible and open documentation, the Internet also developed a large community of invested supporters to help push the infrastructure of the Internet forward. This community took many forms and morphed into what is today the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The usefulness and “shininess” of internet technologies caused for them to be adopted by vendors to create new products. However, “they lacked both real information about how the technology was supposed to work and how the customers planned on using this approach to networking.” This lack of know-how by vendors was recognized, so Dan Lynch in cooperation with the IAB planned a three day workshop for all vendors to come and learn about TCP/IP. It was such a success that this discussion between vendors and researchers was repeated every year following. Eventually a special event was organized for vendors to come and showcase their utilization of TCP/IP, which was the birth of the Interop trade show. Interop is held each year and is used to teach people about new products and the latest technologies in networking. The Internet is composed such that it allows for continuous growth: “New modes of access and new forms of service will spawn new applications, which in turn will drive further evolution of the net itself.” The article ends by positing that one of the biggest questions for the future of the Internet is about how its management will evolve with the vast amount of devices that will be connected to the Internet.

Commentary: ​ The article was written with the purpose of informing the reader of the Internet’s growth, from its origin to its present state (1997, the initial date the article was published). It also details the surrounding support system of the Internet, with its easily accessible and open documentation and research articles, as well as its communities such as the IETF and W3C which help to progress the development of the Internet’s infrastructure. I believe that the article should have been written since it is important for people in networking related fields to have knowledge of why networking systems are the way that they are and the story of how it came to be. The article is successful in conveying the major characteristics of the Internet: social interactions through networking, packet switching, open-architecture networking, communications on a best effort basis, and no global control. The writing of the article is such that it is easy to understand; it is unlike an RFC or Internet Draft which use more technical jargon.

Questions: ​ 1. The ARPANET was started around July 1968, what were the line speeds between sites? a. The proposed line speed was 50 kbps. 2. What is an IMP? a. An Interface Message Processor is a packet switch. 3. What were the initial speeds for NSFNET connections? a. Initially, the NSFNET consisted of six nodes with 56 kbps links. 4. When did the NSFNET become operational? a. The NSFNET became operational in 1986. 5. When was DNS installed? a. DNS was installed in the 1980’s. The article doesn’t give a more specific date for its installation. According to Wikipedia, in 1984, “Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle, and Songnian Zhou, wrote the first Unix name server implementation for the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, commonly referred to as BIND.” 6. Before DNS how did a new node join the network? a. Before DNS, there was “a single table of all the hosts and their associated names and addresses.” A new node joined by being added to the table. 7. Who have you not heard of before as a 'creator', 'developer', etc. of the Internet? a. To be honest, I have never heard of, or remember hearing of any of their names – excluding Bob Kahn and of whom I remember talking about in class.