It was something I always wondered about but never made the effort to find out, so I was pleasantly surprised when one of this week’s readings was Bruce Sterling’s “A Short History of the Internet”.
I found it interesting to learn that the APRA network (as it was called back then) was originally invented as a way for US authorities to communicate with one another if nuclear war destroyed all other forms of communication (Sterling, B 1993, pp01). The idea of dividing each message into different packets and bouncing them from node to node before reaching their destination was brilliant. If big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply wouldn't matter; the packets would still stay airborne, lateralled wildly across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive (Sterling, B 1993, pp01).
It was interesting to track the development of the internet throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Reading about the early stages when the initial ideas were being “kicked around” by RAND, MIT and UCLA really gave me a sense of how far the internet has come in such a short time.
Even in 1993 when this piece was written, Sterling states, “Today there are tens of thousands of nodes in the Internet, scattered over forty-two countries, with more coming on-line every day. Three million, possibly four million people use this gigantic mother-of-all-computer-networks” (pp3)
Since 1993, the number of worldwide users has jumped to over 2 Billion (internetworldstats.com 2011). Sterling states the four things the internet was used was mail, discussion groups, long-distant computing, and file transfers (1993 pp04). Today the internet is used for everything from shopping to getting a degree.
Since 1993, the number of worldwide users has jumped to over 2 Billion (internetworldstats.com 2011). Sterling states the four things the internet was used was mail, discussion groups, long-distant computing, and file transfers (1993 pp04). Today the internet is used for everything from shopping to getting a degree.
It’s hard to imagine life without the internet and if the things it can do today seemed impossible 30 years ago, I can’t wait to what it will be able to do 30 years from now.
I like the way Sterling put it; “The Internet is a rare example of a true, modern, functional anarchy” (1993 pp03)
References
Sterling, B. (1993) 'A Short History of the Internet', The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [URL: http://sodacity.net/system/files/Bruce_Sterling_A_Short_History_of_the_Internet.pdf]
internetworldstats.com, 2011, date accessed 3/08/2011
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Image sourced from: www.language-empire.com
I have to say that I had the exact same reaction. You would think that as 90's kids that grew up using the internet that we would have some knowledge of its history and origins. Do you think that this is showing a considerable failing of the education system system in this country that its children are completely oblivious to the workings of global networks? I think it would have been a much more relevant topic than many that we covered throughout our years of schooling.
ReplyDelete