COMPUTER NETWORKING:A SHORT HISTORY OF COMPUTER NETWORKING

A SHORT HISTORY OF COMPUTER NETWORKING

Computer networking started in the United States in the late 1960s. Through the rapid development of computing and telecommunications, in 1969 the ARPANet program was launched.

The first voice transmission over cables (1876) and by radio waves (1896), the first radio transfer of video images (1936), the first electronic computer (1944), and the first transistor (1948) preceded this milestone of technical history, but the first microprocessor (1971) and the first IBM personal computer (1981), as well as the first digital radio transmission of voice (1988) and image (1991), came later.

The ARPANet program started with the aim of connecting just a few sites, but the first networking experiments immediately proved that ‘‘Internetting’’ was a feasible idea. The program led to the development of the TCP / IP protocol suite (see Section 6), having served as the basis of Internet technology for more than 30 years. These developments resulted in a proliferation in activity, and the number of Internet hosts (networked computers serving several users by Internet services) rapidly increased. As a result of the annual doubling of host numbers, as of the end of the 1990s, dozens of millions of hosts served a worldwide community of an estimated more than 200 million users.

The Internet was established early in the 1980s as a solid infrastructure of networking, mainly in the United States but also with connected subnetworks in Europe and the Asia Pacific region. The organizational, coordinating, and mainly informal controlling frameworks of the Internet were also established by that time. A conscious standardization process also started. These activities resulted in a solid background for an efficiently operating global system of interconnected computers.

Perhaps the most important property of the TCP / IP protocol suite is that it makes possible the interconnection and interworking of subnetworks. The introduction and wide application of the con- cept of such subnetworks played a fundamental role in the rapid and successful proliferation of the Internet technology. The value of integrating diverse subnetworks into one cohesive Internet is what makes the Internet such a great network tool.

After more than 10 years of exclusively special (defense, and later scientific) applications of the emerging network, commercial use began to evolve. Parallel activities related to leading-edge aca- demic and research applications and everyday commodity usage appeared. This parallelism was more or less maintained during more recent periods, as well, serving as a basis of a fast and continuous development of the technology. A breakthrough occurred when, in the mid-1980s, the commercial availability of system components and services was established. Since then the supply of devices and services has evolved continuously, enabling any potential individual, corporate, or public user simply to buy or hire what it needed for starting network-based activities.

While the leading edge in the early 1980s was still just 56 Kbps (leased line), later in the decade the 1.5 Mbps (T1) transmission speed was achieved in connecting the emerging subnetworks.

Late in the 1980s the basics of electronic mail service were also in use. This was probably the most important step in the application of networking to drive innovation prior to the introduction of the World Wide Web technology.

Early in the 1990s the backbone speed reached the 45 Mbps level, while the development and spread of a wide range of commercial information services determined the directions of further evolution in computer networking.

The 1990s brought at least three new developments.

1. The development of a new-generation Internet was initiated in order to overcome the weak- nesses of the traditional Internet technology in handling the exponential growth of the user community, the fast change in quality, reliability, and security requirements, and the increased complexity of the transmitted information. (Strictly speaking, security is outside of the Internet itself. The need for security became a hot topic with the advent of readily accessible infor- mation via the Internet. The present TCP / IP protocol suite does not provide security itself.)

2. The speed of transmission (or the speed of the network) and the coverage of the global infra- structure (including worldwide proliferation as well as dense regional network population) reached new records. This development is still far from saturation. As of the turn of the century, the dozens of millions of Internet hosts had, not homogeneously but steadily, spread out through all continents of the world. At the same time, the high-level backbones operated, at least in the more developed areas, at Gbps speed, and the continents were connected by thousands of optical fibers capable of keeping an extremely high volume of traffic.

3. World Wide Web technology has become a standard all over the world, and by the end of the 1990s an enormous amount of information provision and information access had taken place through the Web.

Through these revolutionary advancements, networking has begun to play an important role world- wide in reforming a great many human activities. Parallel to the developments in speed, quality, reliability, manageability, and cost / performance, many international organizations, national govern- ments, and civil initiatives have launched joint projects with the aim of establishing a new and unavoidable worldwide ‘‘Information Society.’’ New forms of cooperation among governments, in- dustry, telecom, and network service providers, as well as civil organizations, have emerged, and further development is inevitable.