Talk:Internet
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[edit source]The second sentence of the article says "The modern form of Internet, known as World Wide Web, was invented by Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau."
- A team, sponsored by DARPA, designed the internet protocol. Internet protocol allows other protocols use it, like the ftp protocol. Ftp, is short for "File Tranfer Protocol". This was a big thing 45-35 years ago.
- I don't know who Robert Cailliau is, but I know that Tim Berners Lee is credited with the http protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol). It's sites that support the http protocol that should be known as the World Wide Web. They share the internet with sites that support ftp, and, I think other protocols I can't remember because I studied this stuff more than forty years ago.
- The second paragraph of the article says "...Arpanet, was used by the US Military as a method of communication during times of war. It was important to maintain a level of communication from coast to coast, should the Soviet Union attack using nuclear weapons on the mainland."
I thought this wildly incorrect meme died out 30 years ago. This is wildly great story, and it is wildly untrue.
- Yes DARPA, a DoD funding agency, funded the development of the original internet protocol. Yes, once the IP protocol and infrastructure was ready, DARPA paid for the Arpanet.
- But, the assertion that the Arpanet was designed for wartime communication is absolutely untrue. The assertion that it was designed to survive attacks by nuclear weapons? Wildly untrue.
There is a book about the development of internet protocol, entitled, "Where the wizards stay up late". I believe you can find confirmation there. One of the most memorable lectures I experienced, was delivered by a guy named Len Klienrock. He was one of the dozen or so guys who sat on the committee that designed the internet protocol, and the early Arpanet.
Yes, it was intended for this network to be robust enough to survive a certain kinds disasters. That was why the network topography required every pair of routers, on the network, to be connected by at Least two paths. But the disasters they designed it to cope with? A truck hits a telephone pole that is holding up the data cable that connects two important routers. The cable breaks. You want the routers to be smart enough to send their packets down some of those alternate routes. Or a squirrel chews through a cable, or a big storm blows down a telephone pole, or there a fire...
Not nuclear war.
Not nuclear war.
Klienrock was not just impressively smart, he was pretty funny too.
They were charged to do blue-sky, out of the box thinking. So, they sat down and tried to think of all the ways you could send a LOT of data between a bunch of sites. Then they tried to evaluate those methods by cost, by speed, by amount of data. They considered even ridiculous stuff, so they could compare everything. What if the Arpanet relied on writing data on magtapes, then putting those magtapes into Fedex envelopes? Cost? Great. Amount of data? Acceptable. Speed? Abysmal.
So, during this initial blue sky period they did spend a little bit of time, a very little bit of time, thinking about how expensive it would be to develop an Arpanet that could survive an attack by nuclear weapons. They all had a good laugh at how expensive that would be. Do you know what an elector-magnetic pulse is? Well, you get them during a nuclear war. Guarding your data cables against EMP would be shockingly expensive.
Your idea that the Arpanet was designed for communication? I don't believe that is correct. Instant messaging, and video calling, seem obvious now, but it wasn't a thing when DARPA sponsored the Arpanet. Klienrock described their goal was resource sharing. DArPA had deep pockets. It sponsored civilians scientists to do research that had benefits for the military. So, they were buying expensive hardware that would live in a civilian lab. Well, they bought a supercomputer for one brilliant professor at MIT. And now his equally brilliant colleague at Berkeley, wants one too.
Well, they knew those guys slept, spent times with their family, went on vacation, and so those resources were idle most of time. Even when they were friendly and let their colleagues cross campus to Use an idle resource, they were still idle most of the time. What they wanted was to the supercomputers, and all the other really expensive stuff they paid for, hooked to a network, so, when it was idle, other scientist they liked, could log in, and take a turn.
It turned out that, once the Arpanet was up and running lonely grad students could use some of that band width to chat with their distant girlfriends, but that was just a side effect.
I am going to ping some of the people who worked on this article... Alexander Versatile Auggie Gridlock Wikademia