● Name: John Church ● Abstract Due Date: 9/8/19 ● Date: 9/10/19 ● Article Title: Brief History of the ● Author: Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, , Daniel C. Lynch, , Larry G. Roberts, Stephen Wolf. ● Journal: Internet Society

“Brief History of the Internet” provides the reader with a cursory overview of the organizations, motivations, and pivotal moments behind the creation of the internet and its existence up to the date of publication, in 1997. The paper begins by recounting the parties and organization that began the creation of the first networks, and their motivations. The article notes the formation of key organizations and the parties involved in the creation of key technologies over the years following the Internet's inception. The article does not delve into the details of new improvements or the stories behind certain pivotal moments, but instead focuses on giving a brief overview of the parties, technologies, and events largely by name alone.

One interesting aspect of the internet's inception that I did not realize until reading the article, was the largely decentralized nature from the beginning. For example, the article mentions that routers were designed to be “black box gateways” that did not hold on to any information. This was likely in line with DARPA’s goals (preventing sensitive military information fro sitting in places it shouldn’t.) as well as technical limitations of the time (the cost of memory in routers.) I wonder, though, that if the US government knew what the internet would become, if they would have insisted on more centralized control measures and less decentralization.

It was also interesting how there was a switch from NCP to TCP/Ip. I wonder if something like that ever happen today? At the time, I can only assume that the user base was small and well prepared to implement large changes which allowed for the switch. Now, would anything so large be possible?

Two more small points I found especially interesting, were the foresight of the NSF and the culture around the internet from the beginning. NSF apparently “ anticipated the critical issues of intellectual property rights, ethics, pricing, education, architecture and regulation for the Internet.” Meanwhile, “the vendors worked extremely hard to ensure that everyone’s products interoperated with all of the other products - even with those of their competitors.” In modern times, in the midst of issues like google allegedly adding bugs to their websites on other browsers to push users to switch to chrome and with apple and android battling over corralling users into incompatible ecosystems, it is interesting both how different the current environment is from the past and the fact that some, like the NFS, predicted it.

Overall, I thought that the reading gave a good overview of the beginning of the internet for someone who already knows a good deal about it. Since I did not know most of the acronyms or events mentioned, I do wish they went into a bit more detail. It will be interesting to see how much easier it will be to read at the end of the semester.

The ARPANET was started around July 1968, what were the line speeds between sites? 50 kbps What is an IMP? An “Interface Message Processor” is a type of packet switch developed by a group headed by Frank Heart and funded by an RFQ released by DARPA. What were the initial speeds for NSFNET connections? 56 kbps When did the NSFNET become operational? 1985 When was DNS installed? I could not find mention of the date in the paper, but according to cloudns.net1 it became a standard in 1986. Before DNS how did a new node join the network? Using a specific number address (eg. the number was not tied to a string name.) Who have you not heard of before as a 'creator', 'developer', etc. of the Internet? I have not heard most of the names mentioned in the paper.

1 https://www.cloudns.net/blog/dns-hisotry-creation-first/