The Internet

The past, Present, and Future

A talk by Jill Burrows

First Question

What is the internet, anyway?

It's a series of tubes...

...right?

Not quite.

y u no luv me?

When people think of the internet's origins they typically think

AOL

AOL was only a small peice of the internet's story

The whole thing is much, much more organic and messy

A series of fortuitous happenings and inventions

• Morse Code
• Telegraph
• Telephone
• Baudot Code
• Teletype
• Telex
• Universal Turning Machine
• Claude Shannon's Masters Thesis
• Digital Swtiching Circuit
• Vannevar Bush's Memex
• Claude Shannon's Communication Theory
• Phone Modem
• Computer Networking
• TCP/IP

Was computer networking the Internet?

Not quite.

People Fought!

• Hush-A-Phone v. United States — 1956
• Carterphone Decision — 1968
• "Ma Bell" Has Baby Bells — 1984

Computer and telecommunication networks proliferated

• Merit Network — 1966
• MCI — 1963 (delayed until 1969)
• ARPANET — 1969
• Community Memory — 1973
• Western Union launches it's own comsats — 1974
• X.25 — 1976
• Computerized BBS — 1978
• UUCP/USENET — 1978/1980
• Compuserve — 1982
• FidoNet — 1983
• NSFNET — 1985
• UUNET — 1987
• PSINet — 1989

Most networks weren't connected to each other

Of course, people connected these networks together with any method they could

The RFC process created for ARPANET had created a powerful set of standards

which formed the basis of allowing networks to communicate with each other — internetworking, or Internet for short.

Research networks and similar commercial networks came to form the backbone for internetworking

PSINet, UUNET, and CERFnet were instrumental in creating the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) in 1991

this allowed networks to communicate with one another at fixed cost

• ∙Not without controversy
• ∙$10,000 CIX Membership fee
• ∙ANS CO+RE & Mitch Kapor
• ∙No unified Internet

In 1995, NSFNet was replaced by vBNS

This was MCI's infrastructure and replaced the CIX with Network Access Points (NAPs) in geographically diverse areas

• ∙MCI had many technologies by now: Microwave Relays, Statelites and Fiber Optics
• ∙Paved the way for more networks to join the Internet
• ∙Now owned by Verizon

The NAPs evolved into Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)

There are many more IXPs today connecting many networks

There are still many, many networks all internetworking with each other

As we saw,

people and businesses fight over these networks

these fights still go on...

People and business fight over

• Bandwidth
• Device Access
• Generated Data
• Censorship
• Privacy
• Freedom vs. Control
• Regulation over EMF bands
• Lack of investment in Infrasture

The future of the internet depends on you!

How do you care for your Internet?