The internet turns 52 in a few days. Though it is extremely young compared to other technologies in history, the internet today looks nothing like it did when it was born. What was once a decentralised network is now dominated by a few powerful tech behemoths with monopolistic control over their markets. The story of these companies can be explained by "network effects" - a theory that predates the internet but was famously expounded in the 1999 book Information Rules - which predicts that the digital world is mostly about size and user adoption. The more popular a tech product is, the more applications and users it will have. The rise of Facebook and Microsoft, in particular, can be explained by network effects. The internet is now a winner-takes-all market and hence Big Tech finds itself under increased government scrutiny. We tell the story of how the internet began and how it spread.
02 Sep 1969
Techies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) create the first net connection, through a 15-foot cable between two computers. This was the precursor to the Arpanet.
29 Oct 1969
Arpanet is born after the UCLA techies connect to the Stanford Research Institute hundreds of kilometres away. The key part here is how Arpanet works : Messages are broken into blocks of data called packets that are sent independently of one another across the network.
1970
By the end of the year, Arpanet grows to 13 nodes, which include Harvard and MIT. An engineering consulting firm, Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), does the tech work for building Arpanet. In 1973, Arpanet takes the first step to going global : Norway and the UK are linked to the US nodes.
@
Symbol used in email addresses was invented by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, according to Tim Burners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.
Extent of entire internet in 1973
The rudimentary system allows researchers to login to another computer from far away, transfer and save files on the network and send emails.
1982
Arpanet now has 100 nodes and a relatively busy online community. A bulletin board system called Usenet is launched in 1980, becoming the first online forum which lets users post jokes, tips and recipes.
1983
Arpanet wasmanaged by the military in the beginning but then the network operators realised they couldn't manage it forever if it continued to expand. In a move that would decide internet's growth trajectory, they decided that Arpanet should be recognised as a "network of networks", meaningthat it should be decentralised. But how can such a decentralised system be made accessible? The US military asked computer scientists Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf to come up with an answer and they developed the networking standards known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, which gave us format for transmitting data packets.
1986
The internet's backbone, the National Science Network-funded supercomputing centres, is built up across the US, allowing high speeds for users. It should be noted that the internet was still tedious to navigate at this time and simple tasks such as email were cumbersome.
1991
Tim Bernerse-Lee and Robert Cailliau of the European Centre for Nuclear Research invent the World Wide Web, giving birth to the modern internet as we know it.
1994
The US government, headed by Bill Clinton privatises the internet backbone, letting commercial firms be internet service providers. By this time, Arpanet has been decommissioned.
What is Arpanet?
The US Defence Departments's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network that was meant to link researchers spread across the US who were working on military-linked projects. Each Arpanet site had a router called the Interface Message Processor.
What is packet-switching?
The networks that we used for voice telephones are circuit-switched, meaning that while you are talking there is an individual path in the whole network that is dedicated to you (and the person you are talking to).
The internet relies on a form of message-switching which allows individual messages to be routed over the network on shared lines. Packet-switching improves this method further by splitting the messages into standard-length packets of data.
Another way packet-switching made communication easier was that it used computer resources more efficiently and ensured that messages always got through.
Layers of internet
1. TCP/IP internet protocols are the bedrock because they allow different kinds of networks and devices to exchange data. These protocols are mostly decentralised.
2. On top of the protocols is the web as we know it from social media to online search. Tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu occupy large swathes of the second digital layer.
3. Smartphones, cloud-computing and data troves. Here we can see more centralisation with just two main mobile operating systems and three cloud-computing companies. Some internet giants are sitting on unimaginably big and growing piles of data about us.
2017
the world's population has internet access. India has way more mobile subscriptions per 100 people (87.3) than it does broadband subscriptions (1.33) as per UN data. But it's definitely improving at a fast rate leaving the UN compilations way behind.
Source. Adapted from an article by S Aravindakshan in the NIE
Tailpiece.
Got up at 6, the chores and was ready by a quarter to 10. Lekha and the maid had gone across to the ration shop to collect our share of kerosene oil.
It was a comparatively sunny day with less of rain. A quiet day!
PS.
The growth of the internet users from 1990 to 2016.
1991 1st web page and first web bowser released.
1993 Mosaic web browser released.
1994 Netscape web browser released.
1995 Internet explorer, Apache server.
Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon.com
44.5 mn users.
1996 ICQ released.
1997 Google Search.
1999 Alibaba and Napster.
2000 Haidu founded, dot.com bubble bursts.
2001 Wikipedia launched.
2003 Skype launched.
2004 Web 2.0 and Facebook.
2005 You Tube and Gmaps.
2006 Twitter.
2007 IPone.
2008 GitHub, Chrome released.
2009 WhatsApp, Uber, Bitcoin.
2010 Instagram.
2011 WeChat.
2016
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