Who Really Invented the Internet? 497
jaymzter writes "The Wall Street Journal is running an article that it claims seeks to dispel an urban legend about the internet: 'The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet.' The position of the piece is that it was Xerox's contribution of Ethernet that enabled the global series of tubes we know and love today, and what's interesting is that the former head of DARPA supports this claim."
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Informative)
A general wiring specification is hardly on a level playing field with creating the internet.
Ethernet is not a wiring specification. In fact, there are several types of wiring that can carry Ethernet: twisted pair (most common today), coaxial cable (less common), fiber optic, and possibly others. Ethernet is about the protocols which transport data from one computer to another on the same local area network.
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:5, Informative)
The airline industry is heavily subsidized, the US government pays out billions for airport maintenance.
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:4, Informative)
At a certain point of abstraction, we could say that there are dozens of ethernet-like specifications. Prior to all that is the idea of "Packet switching" pioneered by ARPANET. CYCLADES is another government funded (France) project using packet switching and with high influence over today's Internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet-switched_network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES
As a previous poster said, the article is just conservative propaganda.
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:5, Informative)
. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished
Nice pro free market puff piece. It is, of course, utter bullshit.
The ARPANET protocols were first created in tail end of the 60's. Rather than languishing, they grew rapidly by the standards of the day, while being fiddled with until the flag day sometime in the early 80's (82?) when the IPv4 protocol was finalised. Since the early 80's, the number of hosts on the global IPv4 network (i.e. the internet) has grown exponentially, with approximately a 10x growth every 4 years.
Basically, there was never any languishing.
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:5, Informative)
Airlines, eh? The ones that are operating on wafer thing margins after their bailouts? Flying is kept safer by heavy regulation by the FAA. Aircraft technology is developed not by airlines but by the plane manufacturers, which these days means Boeing and Airbus. Airbus gets government subsidies from its European government backers and Boeing gets the same (in the form of defence contracts) from its US government backers.
If Amtrak had even a fraction of the government subsidies that air or automobile travel was getting right now you'd be zipping between major cities on 120MPH+ trains like they do in just about ever other developed country. Amtrak is suffering because it has to rely on privately owned infrastructure that's held by the freight operators. And still Amtrak is a more comfortable service than any flight or long haul road trip. If it weren't for the slow speed (caused by the rickety state of the primitive privately owned tracks) I'd be using it a whole lot more.
This is what conservatives do. They gut public services to the point where they can't function to their full potential, and they say "look! Told you! Government can't do anything right!" Conservatives spend their time in opposition claiming that government is incompetent, and when they get into office they set about proving it.
Ethernet had nothing to do with it (Score:5, Informative)
What enabled the Internet was the idea of layering communications [wikipedia.org]. That way your applications saw the same packets coming from the network regardless of whatever software or hardware lay underneath. That is, rather than try to translate TCP/IP packet data into ethernet packet data, then translate that into DSL packet data, etc. for this post submission to get to slashdot, each layer just encapsulates the higher layer's data. So the TCP/IP packets never know they've been split up into 1542 byte chunks to be transmitted along ethernet to reach my DSL modem. They don't know they've been converted into whatever tortured protocol DSL uses, and so on all the way to slashdot's servers.
You just have underlying layers treat the above layers are data streams. Then the higher levels (e.g. apps) can interoperate completely agnostic to what underlying layers are used. Ethernet was one of those underlying layers, so had nothing to do with it. Ethernet's simplicity and versatility had a lot to do with it being adopted at the hardware level for LANs (as opposed to, say, Token Ring), but it had nothing to do with the Internet.
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:4, Informative)
That and token ring, token bus, starlan, etc. Ethernet only became standard because it was cheap to wire and good enough. Collision detection in networks prior to ethernet switches was a performance killer.
Amtrak $1000? WTF are you talking about? (Score:5, Informative)
Amtrak is $1000 for a cross country journey?! Do you bother to check anything before you put your drivel in to writing?
Here is the Amtrak site: http://www.amtrak.com/home [amtrak.com]
You can look up ticket prices right there.
From New York to Los Angeles: $212
A mishmash of half-truths over-simplifications (Score:3, Informative)
There's a lot of merit in this story I think, but ultimately it muddies the waters. Certainly, it's claim that government-funded research played a less than key role in the development of internetworking seems to be just plain false.
First of all, the work Xerox did that most resembles the Internet protocols was not Ethernet, but PARC Universal Packet (PUP) [wikipedia.org], which is indeed quite directly comparable to the IP in TCP/IP. Ethernet, while a terrific piece of work, mostly served to facilitate networking within a single site.
The article also says implies that the Government-funded ARPANET wasn't really the precursor of the Internet. I think that's an over-simplification. Arpanet wasn't the very first packet switching network (see the work of Baran and Davies), and it certainly wasn't an Internet (network of networks), but it really was the direct antecedent of the Internet as we know it. Arpanet connected universities and other research establishments. It proved the viability of a packet-switching network with all the application smarts at the periphery of the network. In almost all cases, what had been Arpanet connections among the early sites evolved (sometimes by way of NSFnet) to TCP/IP Internet connections, running essentially the same applications and services. So, in all those ways, Arpanet was a crucial step on the way to our TCP/IP-based Internet, and of course, ARPANET was government funded.
A much less sensationalist but much more balanced history of all this can be found at: http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/origins.html [nethistory.info] . The record there strongly suggests that Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf were discussing approaches to internetworking (connecting networks) in spring of 1973. Interestingly, the official PARC Research Report on PUP [bitsavers.org] actually cites the Internet work of Cerf and Kahn, specifically their 1974 A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication [princeton.edu].
So, the government-funded work on internetworking seems to have started before the Xerox work, and the Xerox research time explicitly cited Cerf and Kahn as sources of inspiration for the Xerox work on internetworking. Wouldn't it be nice of the WSJ article made all that clear before everyone started using these over simplifications to prove the futility of government-funded research?
Xerox was part of Enet, which is PART of Inet. (Score:5, Informative)
If you read nothing else, read the first and last paragraphs [following this one ;)].
They address exactly what the OP brought up and why it is not accurate.
Putting aside for just one brief paragraph whether Ethernet has led to the Internet,
Ethernet was developed by DIX - Digital [Equipment Corporation], Intel, and Xerox
in no particular order except that's the name they used. Bob Metcalfe -- cofounder
of 3Com -- has lectured about this for ages, Don't confuse the network we use
today (Ethernet II, 802.3, 802.1q, 10Base-T, 100Base-TX, 1000Base-anything, etc.)
with the original Ethernet [I] spec. Always build on the works of other giants.
Now back to the original claims. There were many networking standards, and IP was
just one of them. Originally computers did not talk to many other computers, even
in the same room. Original DECnet systems would each talk to one or more other
systems, and would relay messages -- much as Usenet did to text.
Ethernet was not the first bus-based network topology. Token-Ring was a strong
competitor, pushed by the great might of IBM. Debates raged as to which was
better, 4Mbps guaranteed-time slots (think like TDMA) or 10Mbps collission-detect
carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) that guaranteed nothing. The rule of thumb
was if you had two "stations" and one was transmitting a bitstream and the other
was sending nothing you could APPROACH 10Mbps. If the two talked to each
other then 5Mbps, and so on. The advent of full-duplex technology (10Base-T)
moved the "bus" into the center of one device (a hub) from which spokes connected
nodes. (You'll note that means it really is a star configuration).
Original Ethernet ran on big fat cables. To connect to it you used a big clamp on
connector with a "tooth" that pierced the outer insulation and hit the center conductor.
Those were called vampire taps. Ethernet at that point was 10Base5. 10MBps, 500m.
Then came "thinwire". Using BNC connectors, T-s for taps, and dual-connectors to
extend, 10Base2 got us 10Mbps at 200m. That was pretty much it.
Aside: around this time someone thought to resurrect token-ring but make it use
expensive glass fiber that needed expensive splicing -- to power the "desktop!"
This 100Mbps network was Fiber Distributed Data Interface.
Anyway so now we come to the part where we have
a. IP and TCP/IP
b. A bus-based network to allow many to many communication
And thus the ARPANET was born. It wasn't to fight a war, it was to do research.
The US military -- reporting to the same US DoD that funded ARPA -- thought it
was such a great idea they created a network called MILNET.
The original systems used specialized computers running specialized code to be
Internet Message Processors (IMPs). These complex one-of-a-kind systems are
what today are outscaled, outpaced, outperformed, and outfeatured by a $50
router running DD-WRT (not to mention WiFi)...
The Internet did not exist because computers in one room could talk to each other
via Ethernet. It exists because that one room could talk to ANOTHER ROOM in
a far away place. Internet means "Interconnected Networks". One Ethernet in
place A talking to one Ethernet in place B.... now THAT's interconnection.
Ehud
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Informative)
It's already happened, numerous times.
The White House presented a bill to congress asking for tax cuts for small businesses that hire US workers. It's something that was in the official GOP platform in 2010. Republican leadership in the House of Representatives refused to put the bill up for a vote. It was defeated, entirely on partisan votes, by the GOP-controlled committee it was brought before.
As Norm Ornstein, the conservative scholar from the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote in his most recent book, the Republican party has become "an insurgent outlier" which is "at war with its own government". Mr Ornstein makes it clear that the blame for the inability of our current government to address even the most basic issues lays entirely on the heads of the GOP. And that is why Mr Ornstein is no longer invited to the Sunday morning news talk shows. He used to be a regular on those shows, but opinions such as his do not fit the moral equivalence that the mainstream media prefers, where "both sides" are equally to blame.
Of course, Mr Ornstein, who has been given awards by conservative groups, had been hailed as one of the intellectual greats of the American conservative movement, is suddenly an horrific traitor to the Right.
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:3, Informative)
Your ticket price is not the real price.
Amtraks ticket prices are Heavily subsidized.
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly this. One should keep in mind that the Wall Street Journal is now nothing but a Murdoch rag.
Re:Conservative opinion piece (Score:5, Informative)
Nice falsehood there, but here's the articles actual thesis, summed up by Blogger Brian Carnell in 1999: "The Internet reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia."
Pretty good summation.
No, pretty bad summation, as it glosses over far too many facts.
Firstly, even though IPv4 because the official protocol of the Internet on Flag Day (1983-01-01), the network running then wasn't the Internet as we know it today. DNS didn't exist until 1983 (prior to that, you had to download HOSTS.TXT from a central repository on a regular basis). The first .COM domain name didn't exist until 1985. The Border Gateway Protocol didn't exist until 1989; prior to that GGP/EGP were in use, and only centralized core routers could participate. CIDR didn't exist until 1993; without CIDR we would have run out of IPv4 address space over a decade ago. Gopher didn't exist until 1991, providing the first end-user friendly way to access data on the Internet. The World-Wide Web didn't exist until late 1990 (in a rudimentary form) -- it wasn't until spring 1993 that CERN announced that the World Wide Web's protocols were available without a license, allowing others to develop web client and server software.
Note that ALL of these contributions came from either publicly funded Universities or from government R&D entities. None came from private concerns.
But you know what I remember of private concerns from this time? CompuServe. America Online. Prodigy. Various BBS's. None of which communicated or inter-operated with one another, and none of which were truly global in scale, and all of which were pretty expensive by modern standards. The government funded/developed Internet and W3 virtually completely wiped them all out.
So claiming that TCP/IP languished for 30 years until it became open to commercial enterprise doesn't reflect the reality of the situation. The Internet wasn't ready for commercial entities until less than 20 years ago. With no BGP (orgs couldn't run their own core routers), CIDR (efficient address allocation), or Gopher/WWW (user friendly data access and document linking/application platforms) none of the successful "private interests" would have had any success. Google, Facebook, heck even Slashdot couldn't exist without all of these technologies in place, and they certainly weren't available 30 years ago. At best, it "languished" for 2 years between 1993 and 1995, when it opened to commercial use for the first time.
(Of course, some (myself included) would argue that it's these same "private/commercial concerns" that are holding back the widespread deployment of IPv6 to fix all of the routing and addressing problems inherent in IPv4. I guess free-market commerce isn't the panacea to everything, huh?)
Yaz
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Informative)
You're right, and that's the reason we need to be precise in our language. Gore detractors continue to say "Al Gore said he invented the internet", and Gore apologists continue to counter, with technical accuracy, that he did not say that. You point out that "I took the initiative in creating the internet" has essentially the same meaning, but most people haven't done the research necessary to know the exact quote.
Parenthetically, there is a good chance that he simply blew his lines during the interview. Had he said "I took the initiative in co-authoring legislation to fund some of the backbone hardware in the newly emerging internet", his detractors wouldn't have had a lot to say. (In some cases, because they did not understand what he had just said.)
Re:twisted pair, twisted logic (Score:5, Informative)
Again, that's actually half the quote.
You don't say.
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Since Gore was speaking from the perspective of a member of the legislative branch, and that the legislation he sponsored opened up NSFNET to commercial development (just a wee bit relevant to the development of the Internet), his claim was entirely fair to make.