Living in the Pre-Internet Age

In the 1950’s, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a “cold war”, each side living in fear of a nuclear attack from the other. In 1957 the Soviet Union placed the first artificial satellite called Sputnik into an Earth orbit. This perceived technical superiority of the Soviets was the trigger that prompted the American government to research new uses for computer systems. In 1958, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created within the Department of Defense (DOD) to establish an American lead in science and technology applicable to the military. The original

1982, TCP/IP was named the protocol suite for the ARPANET. This lead to one of the first definitions of an "internet" as a connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and "Internet" as connected TCP/IP internets. In 1983 ARPANET switched from NCP to TCP/IP, and also that year a section of ARPANET (68 of 113 existing nodes) split off to become MILNET, which became part of the Defense Data Network created the previous year. 1984 saw the birth of the Domain Name Server (DNS) and was also when the number of ARPANET hosts broke 1,000. By 1987 the number of hosts was over 10,000 and by 1989 was over 10,000.

a student at MIT, presented his proposal for a doctoral thesis entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", and in 1964 when Paul Baran, working for The RAND Corporation, wrote a study called "On Distributed Communications Networks". Kleinrock’s proposal was the first paper on the theory of packet-switching (PS), and in it he addressed issues such as message time lapse between communication nodes, channel capacity, usable link capacity to avoid jams, traffic changes, communication between different networks, and even spoke of routing techniques. Baran’s study focused on packet switching networks where the nodes had multiple paths to each other, such that the destruction of one node would not hamper the transmission of message packets from the sending node to the receiving node. The key to this new system was a technique that Baran called "distributed communications." Like the telephone network, switching is concentrated and hierarchical. Calls go to a local office, then to a regional or national switching office if a connection beyond the local area is needed. Each user is connected to only one local office, and each local office serves a large number of users. Therefore, destroying a single local office would cut off many users from the network. A distributed system would have multiple switching nodes, and many links attached to each node. The redundancy would make it harder to cut off service to users, and the switching was distributed among all the nodes in the network so knocking out a few important centers would not disable the whole network. To move data through the network, Baran adapted a technique known as "message switching" or "store-and-forward switching." In a message switching system, each message is labeled with its origin and its destination and is then passed from node to node through the network. T

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