History of Computer

Networking and the

Internet
The Development of Packet Switching:
1961–1972
The field of computer networking and today’s Internet trace their beginnings back to
the early 1960s,
when the telephone network was the world’s dominant communication network.
Recall from Section1.3 that the telephone network uses circuit switching to transmit
information from a sender to a receiver—an appropriate choice given that voice is
transmitted at a constant rate between sender and receiver. Given the increasing
importance of computers in the early 1960s and the advent of timeshared
computers, it
was perhaps natural to consider how to hook computers together so that they could
be shared among
geographically distributed users. The traffic generated by such users was likely to be
bursty—intervals
of activity, such as the sending of a command to a remote computer, followed by
periods of inactivity
while waiting for a reply or while contemplating the received response.
Three research groups around the world, each unaware of the
others’ work [Leiner 1998], began
inventing packet switching as an efficient and robust
alternative to circuit switching. The first published work on
packet-switching techniques was that of Leonard Kleinrock
[Kleinrock 1961; Kleinrock 1964],then a graduate student at
MIT. Using queuing theory, Kleinrock’s work elegantly
demonstrated the
effectiveness of the packet-switching approach for bursty
traffic sources. In 1964, Paul Baran [Baran
1964] at the Rand Institute had begun investigating the use of
packet switching for secure voice over
military networks, and at the National Physical Laboratory in
England, Donald Davies and Roger
Scantlebury were also developing their ideas on packet
The work at MIT, Rand, and the NPL laid the foundations for
today’s Internet. But the Internet also has a long history of a
let’s-build-it-and-demonstrate-it attitude that also dates back
to the 1960s. J. C. R.
Licklider [DEC 1990] and Lawrence Roberts, both colleagues
of Kleinrock’s at MIT, went on to lead the
computer science program at the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA) in the United States.
Roberts published an overall plan for the ARPAnet [Roberts
1967], the first packet-switched computer
network and a direct ancestor of today’s public Internet. On
Labor Day in 1969, the first packet switch
was installed at UCLA under Kleinrock’s supervision, and
hortlyadditional
three thereafterpacket
at the switches
Stanford were
Research Institute (SRI),
installed
UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
 The fledgling precursor to the Internet was four
nodes large by the end of 1969. Kleinrock recalls the
very first use of the network to perform a remote
login from UCLA to SRI, crashing the
system [Kleinrock 2004].
By 1972, ARPAnet had grown to approximately 15
nodes and was given its first public demonstration
by Robert Kahn. The first host-to-host protocol
between ARPAnet end systems, known as the
network-
control protocol (NCP), was completed [RFC 001].
With an end-to-end protocol available, applications
could now be written. Ray Tomlinson wrote the first
Proprietary Networks and Internetworking:
1972–1980
The initial ARPAnet was a single, closed network. In
order to communicate with an ARPAnet host, one had
to be actually attached to another ARPAnet IMP. In
the early to mid-1970s, additional stand-alone
packet-switching networks besides ARPAnet came
into being: ALOHANet, a microwave network linking
universities on the Hawaiian islands [Abramson
1970], as well as DARPA’s packet-satellite [RFC 829]
and packet-radio networks [Kahn
1978]; Telenet, a BBN commercial
packet-­switching network based
on ARPAnet technology; Cyclades, a
French packet-switching network
pioneered by Louis Pouzin
[Think 2012]; Time-sharing networks
such as Tymnet and the GE
Information Services network,
among others, in the late 1960s and
early 1970s [Schwartz 1977]; IBM’s
SNA (1969–1974), which paralleled
the ARPAnet work [Schwartz 1977].
These architectural principles were embodied in TCP. The
early versions of TCP, however, were quite different from
today’s TCP. The early versions of TCP combined a reliable
in-sequence delivery of data via end-system
retransmission (still part of today’s TCP) with forwarding
functions (which today are
performed by IP). Early experimentation with TCP,
combined with the recognition of the importance of
an unreliable, non-flow-controlled, end-to-end transport
service for applications such as packetized
voice, led to the separation of IP out of TCP and the
development of the UDP protocol. The three key
Internet protocols that we see today—TCP, UDP, and IP—
were conceptually in place by the end of the 1970s.
In addition to the DARPA Internet-related research, many other
important networking activities were
underway. In Hawaii, Norman Abramson was developing ALOHAnet,
a packet-based radio network that allowed multiple remote sites on
the Hawaiian Islands to communicate with each other. The ALOHA
protocol [Abramson 1970] was the first multiple-access protocol,
allowing geographically distributed
users to share a single broadcast communication medium (a radio ­
frequency). Metcalfe and Boggs
built on Abramson’s multiple-access protocol work when they
developed the Ethernet protocol [Metcalfe 1976] for wire-based
shared broadcast networks. Interestingly, Metcalfe and Boggs’
Ethernet protocol
was motivated by the need to connect multiple PCs, printers, and
shared disks [Perkins 1994]. Twenty-five years ago, well before the
PC revolution and the explosion of networks, Metcalfe and Boggs
were
A Proliferation of Networks: 1980–1990

By the end of the 1970s,

approximately two hundred hosts
were connected to the ARPAnet. By
the end of the 1980s the number of
hosts connected to the public ­
Internet, a confederation of networks
looking much like today’s Internet,
would reach a A Proliferation of
In the ARPAnet community, many of the final pieces of
today’s Internet architecture were falling into
place. January 1, 1983 saw the official deployment of
TCP/IP as the new standard host protocol for
ARPAnet (replacing the NCP protocol). The transition [RFC
801] from NCP to TCP/IP was a flag day
event—all hosts were required to transfer over to TCP/IP
as of that day. In the late 1980s, important
extensions were made to TCP to implement host-based
congestion control [Jacobson 1988]. The DNS,used to
map between a human-readable Internet name (for
example, gaia.cs.umass.edu) and its 32-bit
IP address, was also developed [RFC 1034].
 The Internet Explosion: The
1990s
The main event of the 1990s was to be the
emergence of the World Wide Web application,
which
brought the Internet into the homes and
businesses of millions of people worldwide. The
Web served as a platform for enabling and
deploying hundreds of new applications that we
take for granted today,
including search (e.g., Google and Bing) Internet
The second half of the 1990s was a period of tremendous
growth and innovation for the Internet, with
major corporations and thousands of startups creating
Internet products and services. By the end of the millennium
the Internet was supporting hundreds of popular
applications, including four killer
applications:
E-mail, including attachments and Web-accessible e-
mail The Web, including Web browsing and Internet
commerce Instant messaging, with contact lists
Peer-to-peer file sharing of MP3s, pioneered by
Napster
Interestingly, the first two killer applications came from the
research community, applications came from the research
community, whereas the last two were created by a few
young entrepreneurs.were created by a few young
entrepreneurs.
The period from 1995 to 2001 was a roller-coaster ride for
the Internet in the financial markets. Before
they were even profitable, hundreds of Internet startups
made initial public offerings and started to be
traded in a stock market. Many companies were valued in
the billions of dollars without having any
significant revenue streams. The Internet stocks collapsed
in 2000–2001, and many startups shut down.Nevertheless,
a number of companies emerged as big winners in the
Internet space, including
Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo, e-Bay, Google, and Amazon.
 The New Millennium
Innovation in computer networking continues at a rapid
pace. Advances are being made on all fronts,
including deployments of faster routers and higher
transmission speeds in both access networks and in
network backbones. But the following developments merit
special attention:
Since the beginning of the millennium, we have been seeing
aggressive deployment of broadband
Internet access to homes—not only cable modems and DSL but also
fiber to the home, as discussed in Section1.2. This high-speed
Internet access has set the stage for a wealth of video applications,
including the distribution of user-generated video (for example,
YouTube), on-demand streaming of movies and television shows
(e.g., Netflix), and multi-person video conference (e.g., Skype,