By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Director of  Academic Computing and User Services

A Bit of History

Vanity Fair magazine recently published an interesting article entitled An Oral History of the Internet in which they featured interviews with some of the major figures in the development of the Internet and the Internet services which we take so much for granted today. They point out that 50 years ago, the U.S. Department of Defense established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). One of the big ideas to come out of ARPA was a network that could survive a nuclear attack (that being a major concern of the times.) The telephone system of that time was highly centralized and vulnerable to "collateral damage" (this was well before the Bell System breakup.) What was needed was a network that could use multiple paths so that if one path was unavailable, communication traffic could be switched to an alternate route. From this idea, the ARPANET was born, eventually.

Richard Nixon was elected President, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Woodstock happened and ...

1969 saw the first real implementation of the network, with communication initially sent between researchers at UCLA and Stanford University. This was the "Kitty Hawk" of the Internet with many more development and expansions to come. One of the early inventions of this new network was the use of the at sign (@) to designate a particular user on a particular connected computer. In the 1970's Vinton Cerf, often called the "Father of the Internet" (no relation to Al Gore), developed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that is still used for Internet communication today as part of the TCP/IP standards that may be familiar to some.

Even though the late 1970's and early 1980's saw the development of the commercially-available microcomputer (with much credit to the Apple II for that), the Internet remained the domain of the larger multi-user computers, but not mainframes built by IBM. While personal microcomputers provided access to Bulletin Board Systems and store and forward networks like FIDONet, the Internet was developed around the UNIX operating system favored by researchers and computer scientists. Early Internet software staples such as telnet (for remote terminal access), FTP (for file transfer), and electronic mail routed via the Internet were only available on UNIX systems.

NTSU makes the connection

UNT (then NTSU) first connected to the Internet in 1987 via TEX-Net, later named THE-Net for "Texas Higher Education Network." TEX-Net started as a network of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX systems using the networking protocols native to the VAX operating system. DEC produced what were called minicomputers (as opposed to the monolithic IBM mainframes) and ran UNIX as well as the proprietary DEC VAX operating system. Sometime in 1987 ARPANET traffic began to be routed over TEX-Net and UNT (well, NTSU at the time) joined this still exclusive Internet club (well, ARPANET club at the time.) UNT's Internet domain registration record dates back to September of 1986, however, my personal recollection is that we didn't achieve general availability of the Internet on our Computing Center VAX cluster until 1987.

In October of 1988, the Computing Center announced the availability of TCP/IP and the "ARPA Internet" on (now newly renamed) UNT's VAXcluster system via an article in the then-printed Benchmarks newsletter. The article was heralded by a banner proclaiming "UNT CONNECTED TO ARPANET" pulled, ironically enough, by what appears to be a World War I-vintage biplane. This seems ironic now because just as barnstormers advanced the development of aviation, the Internet was about to go through a rapid development period which saw many new Internet usage ideas come and sometimes go as better ideas replaced them. In the barnstorming days, thousands of people had the chance to experience aviation first hand. In our 1988 Benchmarks issue, we announced that UNT had been featured in an InfoWorld article entitled, Network Brings Academic Computing to Thousands.

Time marches on

It's not my intention to recount the entire history of the Internet here, but a couple of additional anniversaries are worth mentioning. It's been 15 years since the release of the first graphical World Wide Web browser, named Mosaic. The World Wide Web protocols had been developed by 1991. But Mosaic, written in their spare time by some students working at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications, was first available in 1993. One of those students, Marc Andreessen, later used Mosaic as the basis for a commercial Web browser called "Netscape". It was the predominant web browser until Microsoft discovered the Internet and "bundled" Internet Explorer with its Windows OS. But Mosaic did something that showed the potential of the World Wide Web. It could display pages of information, transmitted over the Internet, that had pictures mixed in with the text. All Internet browsers can trace their roots back to Mosaic, and since it was open source, I'd bet that some remnants of Mosaic code still exist in the modern versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape's progeny, Firefox.

One more anniversary is worth noting. 10 years ago, Benchmarks Online first appeared on the World Wide Web. Volume 1, number 1 of Benchmarks Online was published in April of 1998. I guess we weren't fooling since here we're still publishing today. The topics of the day were SPAM and misuse of "Everyone" mail. Some things don't change.

So, we can thank a bit of 20th-century nuclear paranoia for one of the most dramatic social changes here in the 21st century. The Internet has changed the way in which we shop, sell, socialize, date, publish, subscribe, and do business, among other things. We've moved from reaching thousands 20 year ago to reaching billions today. These 50, 40, 20, 15, and 10 year anniversaries highlight just how far we've come. Having seen the transformation, it seems quite remarkable to me. However, our incoming freshmen have never known a period in their life where the Internet didn't exist.^* Here we are barely 40-years into the age of the Internet. By the aviation timeline, we're still flying in propeller planes, but about to enter the age of jet travel. Hang on. It may be a bumpy ride.