1957 - ARPA

President Dwight D. Eisenhower set up the Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA) after the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik.

The organization united some of America's most
 brilliant people, who developed the United States'
first successful satellite in 18 months.

Several years later ARPA began to focus on computer
 networking and communications technology.

1962 - DARPA

The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be
enabled through networking
was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962
discussing his "Galactic Network" concept.* see note below

Vision
He envisaged a globally interconnected set of computers
through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. 
In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. 

Realistically, the net as we know it was unforeseeable and financially inconceivable; 
the scope of telecommunications of the day along with then current techno-logistics 
was such that any large scale ideas beyond inter-institutional were purely fictional. 

Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, 
starting in October 1962.


 

*  Note - re arpa, darpa & ipto

Chronology of agency name changes

( Charles Babbage Institute - 
Center For the History of Information Processing,
University of Minnesota)

 

 
 
1960's

Leonard Kleinrock at MIT

- published the first paper on packet switching theory in July 1961
and the first book on the subject in 1964. Kleinrock convinced others of the
theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits,
which was a major step along the path towards computer networking.

4The Roads and  Crossroads of Internet History
                                                                                                          by  Gregory R. Gromov

1969 - The first LOGs

UCLA -- Stanford
According toVinton Cerf:
 ...the UCLA people proposed to DARPA
to organize and run a 
Network Measurement Center 
for the ARPANET project...
 
 

Around Labor Day in 1969, BBN delivered an Interface Message
Processor (IMP) to UCLA that was based on a Honeywell DDP 516, and
when they turned it on, it just started running. It was hooked by 50 Kbps
circuits to two other sites (SRI and UCSB) in the four-node network:
UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB),
and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
 

The plan was unprecedented: 
Kleinrock, a pioneering computer
science professor at UCLA, and his small group of graduate
students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer 
and try to send it some data.

They would start by typing "login," and seeing if the
letters appeared on the far-off monitor...



"We set up a telephone connection
                                                     between us and the guys at SRI...,"
                                                     Kleinrock ... said in an interview:
                                                     "We typed the L and we asked on
                                                     the phone,

                                                     "Do you see the L?"
                                                     "Yes, we see the L," came the
                                                     response.
                                                     "We typed the O, and we asked,
                                                     "Do you see the O."
                                                     "Yes, we see the O."
                                                     "Then we typed the G, and the
                                                     system crashed"...

                                                  Yet a revolution had begun"...

 Sacramento Bee, May 1, 1996

 

1972 - 
First public demonstration of  ARPANET

In late 1971, Larry Roberts at DARPA decided that
people needed serious motivation to get things going.
In October 1972 there was to be an International Conference on Computer Communications,
so Larry asked Bob Kahn at BBN to organize a public demonstration of the
ARPANET.

It took Bob about a year to get everybody far
enough along to demonstrate a bunch of applications.
The idea was to install a packet switch and a Terminal Interface Processor
or TIP in the basement of the Washington Hilton Hotel,
and let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running applications all over the U.S ....

 The demo was a roaring success, much to the surprise
of the people at AT&T who were skeptical about whether it would work.4

 

1973 - 
First International connections to Arpanet

International Computer Communications begins with connections to England, University College of London, and Norway (NORSAR).14
 

Exerpts from The Internet Index Number 3

95
12 February 1995
Estimated number of people who can use interactive services on the Internet: 13.5 million
Percentage of Australian homes with a personal computer: 25
Annual fee, in pounds, of dial-up access to the Internet with British Telecomm: 1750
Percentage of Estonian elementary and secondary schools connected to the Internet: 16
Estimated number of U.S. newspapers offering interactive access: 3,200
Estimated number of jobs that would be created under proposed deregulation of the
telecommunications industry: 1.4 million

28 April 1995
Number of books about love and sex on the Internet: 5
 Percentage increase in number of hits on FEMA Web server in the week following the Oklahoma City bombing: 150
Number of Web pages indexed by the Lycos Internet catalog: 3.6 million
Number of WWW servers known to Lycos: 23,550
Number of subscribers to CompuServe in Europe: 300,000
Number of users on the Internet: No one really knows

 

29 June 1995
Venture capital invested in Internet companies, first quarter 1995: $47 million
Venture capital invested in Internet companies, all of 1994: $42 million
Number of PBS stations with WWW home pages: 25
Number of subscribers on Apple Computer's eWorld online service: 80,000
Number of new Internet domains registered in British Columbia, May, 1995: 343
Number of new Internet domains registered in Manhattan, May, 1995: 340
Number of Internet access providers in Egypt: 4

2 September 1995
Very approximate ratio of number of Internet users to number of tiles in the mosaic in the Gold Room
at Stockholm City Hall: 2
Number of US invention patents available for searching on the Internet: over 158,000
At current growth rates, estimated time at which everyone on Earth will be on the Internet: 2004
Length of time the NSFNET formed the backbone of the Internet: 9 years
Cost, per month, of USA Today Online: $14.95
Cost of one Mexican Blond Tarantula, available for sale online: $45
Percentage of officers of the National Organization of Women with WWW home pages: 100
Estimated number of different users searching the Yahoo database between May 1 and May 7, 1995: 1.4 million

14 October 1995
Number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives participating in the Constituent Electronic Mail System: 119
Estimated number of subscribers to online services: 12 million
Dataquest estimate of revenues for online services in 1997: $3.3 billion
Number of subscribers to Internet World magazine: 208,000
Number of subscribers to Cosmopolitan: 2.3 million
Average age of users of the Yahoo directory service: 35
Estimated number of Internet hosts at the end of the century: 101 million
Number of digits of pi available on the Internet: 3.2 billion
Time taken to compute those digits: 37 hours

11 November 1995
Number of former Venezuelan presidents using the Internet while under house arrest: 1
Cost, per day, of Gatorade's ad on ESPN's Web site: $822
Cost, per day, of an ad on CompuServe's Web site: $333
According to President Clinton, percentage of public schools in California that will be on the Internet by March, 1996: 100
As of 1996, annual cost for an Internet domain name: $50
Best estimate of number of Internet users in July, 1995: 20-30 million
Number of Internet service providers, worldwide: over 1400

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©1999 db jones Pentach Pages wg new zealand
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