ARPANET
The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In the
late
1960’s the U.S. military was desperately afraid of a nuclear attack
from the
Soviet Union. The United States formed the Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA)
within the Department of Defense to establish a
bombproof network to connect
military bases. ARPANET’s physical network was
established in 1969 to enable
universities and research organizations to
exchange information freely. The
first two nodes that formed the ARPANET were
UCLA and the Stanford Research
Institute, shortly after the University of
Utah was added to ARPANET. The
Network Control Protocol (NCP) was
initially used as the ARPANET protocol,
beginning in 1970. By 1971, a total
of 23 hosts at 15 locations were connected
to the ARPANET. The following
year, the first international connections
occurred, linking the University
College of London (UK) and the Royal Radar
Establishment (Norway) to the
ARPANET. The way ARPANET was set up is so that if
one of the network links
became disrupted by enemy attack, the traffic on it
could automatically be
rerouted to other links. Fortunately, the Net rarely has
come under enemy
attack. In the 1970s, ARPA also sponsored further research into
the
applications of packet switching technologies. This included extending
packet
switching to ships at sea and ground mobile units and the use of radio
for
packet switching. Ethernet was created during the course of research into
the
use of radio for packet switching, and it was found that coaxial cable
could
support the movement of data at extremely fast rates of speed. The
development
of Ethernet was crucial to the growth of local area computer
networks. The
success of ARPANET made it difficult to manage, particularly
with the large and
growing number of university sites on it. So it was broken
into two parts. The
two parts consisted of MILNET, which had the military
sites, and the new,
smaller ARPANET, which had the nonmilitary sites. On
January 1,1983, every
machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. TCP/IP
became the core Internet
protocol and replaced NCP (old ARPANET language)
completely. Thanks to TCP/IP
MILNET and ARPANET remained connected
through a technical scheme called IP
(Internet Protocol); which enables
traffic to be routed from one network to
another as necessary. All the
networks connected to the Internet speak IP, so
they all can exchange
messages. Although there were only two networks at that
time, IP was designed
to allow for tens of thousands of networks. An unusual
fact about the IP
design is that every computer on an IP network is just as
capable as any
other, so any machine can communicate with any other machine. In
1985 the
National Science Foundation began announcing plans for its new T1
lines,
which would be finished by 1988. Soon after the completion of the
T1
backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on
upgrading
the network again. The same year the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps
was introduced
to the public. While the T3 lines were being constructed, the
Department of
Defense disbanded the ARPANET and the T1 and later T3
backbone replaced ARPANET.
The original 50Kbs lines of ARPANET were taken
out of service. In 1990 ARPANET
was replaced by the National Science
Foundation Network (NSFNET), the same
company that founded the t1 and t3, to
connect its supercomputers to regional
networks. In my opinion I think the
government did an excellent job in
developing the Internet. Essentially, the
ARPANET can be viewed as the embryo
from which the Internet grew. The
government fostered and encouraged the growth
of private Internet
corporations. Today the Internet spans across all 7
continents and connects
the whole world with some clicks of a mouse and typing
at the
keyboard.
Bibliography
1.)Casting the Net: From Arpanet to
Internet and Beyond (Unix and Open
Systems Series) Peter H. Salus /
Paperback / Published 1995 2.) Building the
Arpanet: Unpublished Source
Documents of the First Peter Salus(Editor) /
Hardcover / Published
1998