Happy birthday, the internet – Telegraph Blogs

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Ian Douglas


Happy birthday, the internet

Forty years ago today computer was joined with computer in a union that would not be limited to just a few minutes of slow, buggy data transfer, it would transcend the boundaries oftechy types and become part of everyday life, closely bound into our economic and social structures. Here we celebrate the ten cleverest youngish men who made it happen, and in so doing designed the mechanics behind the modern world.

JCR Licklider, conceptual founder of the internet
The Intergalactic Computer Network was the jokey name given to the hypothetical network Licklider proposed between his colleagues at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [Darpa, the US military research institute] and a few computer-literate universities including Stanford, UCLA and Berkeley. He put the case for standardised protocols of computer communication and was the centre of communication for those who would later connect computers based on his ideas. After he leftDarpa he joined BBN Technologies, who built the hardware that made the network possible.

Larry Roberts
, builder of Arpanet
Arpanet was the network that first put it all into practice. Darpa head of information processing, Robert Taylor, wanted to link computers together to share resources and information. His researchers always wanted more computing power and many of them were duplicating each other's work. Taylor had succeededLicklider and was aware of his theoretical work on the ICN , so he gave it to Larry Roberts to build. After an initial plan to connect the computers was poorly received, Taylor came up with the idea of the Interface Message Processor [IMP], small gateway computers that would handle the networking jobs for the large computers used in the laboratories, connected by modems capable of transfer rates of 50Kb per second. TheIMPs would later come to be called routers. You probably have one in your house.

Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, hypertext and the OLS
At Stanford in the late sixties the really exciting computer action was at Stanford Research Institute, now known as SRI International. Their vision of AI was one of extending the human mind rather than developing independent thinking machines, and distributed computing was their key platform. In attempting to build a computer system that the operator could use as a part of their own thought processes, helping with memory and concept association as much as with repetitive calculating tasks, Engelbart and his team developed the mouse and a method of creating links between key words in documents as a way of chasing a theme through your own and other's research work. Ted Nelson had earlier coined the word hypertext for this way of linking, both men following conceptual work published during the second world war by Vannevar Bush.

Paul Baran, inventor of packet switching
The IMPs, or routers, neither know nor care what kind of data is being transmitted. The information is broken down into standard-sized bursts, or packets, that are transmitted separately and re-assembled at their destination. If any have been lost along the way they can be requested again to complete the picture. In this way momentary failures in the network can be circumvented and wholesale failures of entire sections of pathways can be overcome. Large transfers do not require an expensive dedicated line, they can take as many different paths as there are packets. It is this redundancy that gives theinternet its versatility and resilience, and Paul Baran's work made that possible.

Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, co-developers of TCP/IP
Transmission Control Protocol [TCP] and Internet Protocol [IP] are just two of the communication languages and standards in the internet suite called TCP/IP. Together they set the ways in which the routers can send packets of data to each other. Without their standardisation universal communication between computers would be impossible, and it's throughKahn and Cerf's work that it's as easy to contact a server in Indonesia as it is to connect to one down the street. The two men were awarded the presidential medal of freedom, the highest civilian award the US president can give, in 2005.

Bob Metcalfe, inventor of ethernet
IEEE 802.3, or ethernet, is a wiring and local networking protocol that uses packet switched data transfer to create connections between devices with a single backbone running between them all. The name comes from that single backbone, likening the common connection to radio networks, with everything connecting to a common ether rather than directly connecting to each other. The local area network, or LAN, became standardised.

Ray Tomlinson, first man to send an email
In 1971 in a laboratory at BBN Technologies, Ray Tomlinson dragged his fingers across a keyboard to make some nonsense text and sent them from one computer to another, sitting next to his but only connected through Arpanet.  Email was born. Nigerian princes and would-be sellers of illicit prescription drugs flexed their fingers and started typing.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTTP, and thereby the web
Surely you know the story of Sir Tim Berners-Lee? Working at Cern in the late eighties and very early nineties in Switzerland he developed a new protocol for the presentation and transfer of information using a new kind of program – the browser – that made hypertext linking and searching easier than it had ever been before. The simplicity of the protocol and the decision to make the technology freely available to anyone who wanted to use it fed a huge expansion in content and the mass embrace of networked computers by a non-technical public. MrBerners-Lee became Sir Tim and he regularly appears on lists of the greatest Britons.

Robert Cailliau, co-developer of HTML with Berners-Lee
Sir Tim did not work alone. Robert Calliau and a team of student researchers developed the simple language of tags called hypertext markup language [HTML] that brought online publishing within the grasp of anyone with some server space rented for a few pounds a month and a collection of pictures of their cats.

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