--------------------------------------------------------------------- N o . 2 : H o w t h e i n t e r n e t b e g a n T H E S C O T S M A N M o n d a y , 1 7 J a n u a r y 2 0 0 0 --------------------------------------------------------------------- TOWARDS the end of last year articles began appearing declaring the 30th anniversary of the internet. Actually, this date was fairly arbitrary and you can expect to see more 30th anniversary celebrations taking place for at least another 24 years. Experiments with the technology that led to the internet began in the early Sixties. The key development was known as packet switching which, in essence, meant breaking data up into small pieces - packets - then transmitting them and reassembling the data at the other end. This remains the essence of the internet. In 1962 J C R Licklider at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston wrote a series of memos describing a concept he called the Galactic Network. A few months later he became head of computer research at the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa). In 1967 Lawrence Roberts published his Plan for the "Arpanet" using packet switching. Two years later "nodes" were established at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford University, also in California, which could send e-mails to each other. This breakthrough in September 1969 is the date that some have fixed as the beginning of the net. Within 18 months, a dozen major US universities were plugged into Arpanet. What may seem strange is the heavy financial involvement of the US military in this apparently academic experiment. In fact there was a strong Cold War logic. The ability to respond to threats from the Soviet Union required reliable communications. It was easy to imagine a scenario where a nuclear strike would take out lines of communication that would make it impossible to launch missiles in retaliation. Last week we described the internet as being a bit like a road system with motorways and smaller routes all carrying traffic. If a motorway is closed, then traffic can use side roads. So if a nuclear strike broke one of the information arteries, US military communication could continue. To begin with, nobody thought of using Arpanet commercially. For a start, there were no home computers. Added to that, the scientists and engineers who were using Arpanet had to fight with something that was the absolute opposite of user-friendly and required a fairly detailed knowledge of arcane computer languages. But throughout the Seventies the net matured as standards were agreed. The most important was TCP/IP architecture developed by Vint Cerf and others at Stanford University. By 1983, this was accepted as the universal means of communication between computers on the net. The word "internet", incidentally, made its first appearance in 1972. The Eighties saw the internet and similar technologies facilitating the development of online communities. Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP) was invented in 1978 and became the basis of the Usenet discussion groups, which are still extremely popular today. There are thousands of these groups where people read and respond to electronic messages covering every topic under the sun. We will look at these in more detail in a future article. At the same time Bitnet (Because It's Time Network) linked IBM mainframe computers in academic institutions. This began to offer individual e-mail, then software was developed to send e-mails out to lists of subscribers, which created other communities of interest. These became more widespread as gateways were created that allowed e-mail to be exchanged with other people across the internet. Two standards were developed - telnet and file transfer protocol (FTP) - which allowed users on one computer to work on another computer that could be thousands of miles away. At the same time, the internet was gradually becoming easier to use. It was still the preserve of academics, but students of subjects other than computing, physics or engineering could begin to make use of the net by the early Eighties. But outside, few had heard of it. AOL was not started until 1985. And although the first home computers were coming into the shops, modems were few and far between. Next week we'll look at how the internet moved out of academia and became the cause of, arguably, the world's greatest communications revolution.