New Technology Briefing: An overview of the Internet

Abstract

This paper takes a broad look at the history and construction of the Internet, and tracks the evolution of the Internet from early concept as a military communications backbone through to its present commercial orientation. Specific references are drawn to the advent of marketing and personalisation on the Internet, and the possibilities for new business models and open competition. How it all started Imagine that you consider yourself to be the world’s largest superpower. You begin to notice that the command-and-control capability for your military might is a series of point-to-point connections. Worse than this, the new technology of computing is proliferating across all your sites and doesn’t communicate with any of the other sites very well. There’s a real danger that a thoughtfully placed attack on a couple of key links in your communications could disable your military efforts very quickly. You’re probably worried enough to spend a fair amount of taxpayers’ money on fixing this. This is roughly the situation that the US Air Force responded to in 1962. Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a US government agency), was commissioned to find a way around this problem. His report recommended an extensive ‘packet-switched’ network. Messages would be cut into small chunks, each addressed with destination and sender information, and then sent from computer to computer in the linked network. If an individual computer were lost, the network could reroute packets via other machines. If packets were lost, the receiver could request a resend from the originator. The Internet was born. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began to fund an extensive development of the networking infrastructure across military and academic establishments in the US. As the research continues, the network establishes its own basic communications protocol (TCP/IP), basic services (e-mail), local area network and dial-up connectivity and a number of useful services for transferring data (eg the file transfer protocol and simple mail transport protocol). These are all based on the basic packet switching of the Internet and establish its use among academic institutions in the US. Today, the Internet spans the globe, with most countries having their own Internet backbone, and with a large commercial underpinning to the funding and expansion of the network. The same basic protocols and architecture are still underpinning the Internet — although some are beginning to show signs of this global strain.