It's a good account of ARPANET through early TCP/IP. Also focuses on BBN for a good chunk which is cool because the name does not come up a lot. Definitely would recommend if you haven't read it before.
>Also focuses on BBN for a good chunk which is cool because the name does not come up a lot.
That makes me feel a bit old given that I knew a lot of people at BBN when I was in school although I didn't really know much about the proto-internet at the time :-)
But you're right. BBN's role has sort of faded into history.
Recently, no, but I was given a copy when I started work at BBN right out of college: BBN was the east coast node of the original ARPA net. Fun read from what I remember.
I listened to it again in 2017, having read it a few years after it originally came out. It still stands up well.
I consider the book to be one of the best general introductions to the history and politics of the establishment of the ARPANET/Internet, but it depends what you're looking for and what your degree of involvement and interest in the history of computing is! Some reviewers consider it a bit dry; I didn't.
You'll learn about the socio-political conditions in the US that led to the establishment of DARPA, the key personalities who drove the effort technically and politically and the invention of packet switching and network protocols.
The book serves as an excellent base for further reading on this era, such as the magisterial biography of JCR Licklider, "The Dream Machine", Steven Levy's "Hackers", John Markoff's bizarre and entertaining "What The Dormouse Said".
I read it a couple years ago. Quite good, but I still think Janet Abbate’s Inventing the Internet is better (more technical detail, better analysis of the political conflicts that led to the internet in its current form).
finished it a few months back - goes in to a lot of detail you may have missed in whatever history you may have read yourself. Nothing revolutionary but a lot of "oh, huh, never realised/knew that!" moments
I find people in our industry don't always know history of how things came to be, this is a good book to get some of the earliest networking history.
I wish teens today could experience the glory of the Internet in the 90s. It was an anarchist’s wasteland of data and possibility, and the idea of there even being consequences for anything you might do online seemed absurd.
9/11 changed the tone of the culture. Not just on the Internet. Underground raves, for example, pretty much died out on account of the more serious powers and tone given to law enforcement. Air travel will never be the same. Traveling in general -- we Canadians used to be able to cross the border to the U.S. with just a driver's license. Awful Anti-Islamic hate speech is practically mainstream. An authoritarian streak has entrenched itself in the continent's politics, starting in the Bush era and radically deepening now.
What's happened on the Internet is only one symptom of this.
I was a (Canadian) kid in the blue boxing and codes scene in the early 90s. I lived through Operation Sundevil, the persecution of Phil Zimmerman and PGP users, the Clipper chip fiasco, and the V-chip with the 1996 communications act (which led to vast media consolidation). By then it was clear the government were going to surveil everything and try to censor as much as they could, and that this was completely bipartisan initiative that was driven by the unelected career senior public servants and private corporations in law enforcement, intelligence, and the security establishment.
Individual politicians fought these efforts to bring some of them down (in the case of Clipper, a surprising mix from John Kerry , our 2004 US democratic Presidential candidate, to John Ashcroft (!) who later became GWB’s attorney general and completely changed positions , supporting STELLAR WIND which was revealed by Snowden).
The EFF (formed after Sundevil and funded by Mitch Kapor’s Lotus 1-2-3’a fortunes), Wired magazine (much more iconoclastic in the 90s), 2600 magazine, Phrack, and the ACLU all did much to educate people about the risks. For a time, we listened.
STELLAR WIND was when the 1960s-era Military SIGINT programs like ECHELON melded with broad domestic surveillance. The populace was too angry and fearful to stop it in the mid aughts.
Similar to how the military industrial complex grew regardless of who was politically in charge, the security establishment has become an end onto itself that accelerated once terrorism scored a major blow on 9/11. Or maybe it was a glimpse of today’s cynicism of wanting unlimited power/deficits/surveillance/Executive orders/military options for your own party when it controls the presidency, but not the other party.
There probably was a window in the 90s to mid aughts where things weren’t well under control, but funding after 9/11 fixed that.
It will require an educated electorate and major mandate given to a future congress and president to undo this situation, and it likely will require sustainment over 3 or 4 terms to stick. Which is to say: The realm of remote possibility, but not likely. Adapt accordingly.
I was a kid in the mid-late 90s and even wrote my senator about Echelon for a civics class project. It wasn't 'proven' but it was known. That senator, a few years later, was the only one to vote against the PATRIOT Act (Russ Feingold, WI).
The movie Enemy of the State[1] came out in 1998. It showed a kind of worst-case scenario of Echelon, taking real capabilities and stretching them beyond what was possible (there aren't surveillance cameras everywhere, even today, especially not that can be remotely accessed, though we're getting there; also, satellites or drones can't be retasked instantly[2])
[2] ETA: Agreed, Eyes in the Sky is a great book detailing Gorgon Stare, but that requires pre-deployment of drone(s) and only became operational this decade. I agree it's situational irony that people saw Enemy of the State as a roadmap rather than as a cautionary tale.
I think we were all a bit naive in the 90s thinking that the sheer amount of data made each of us somewhat anonymous. The consequences of extremely cheap mass storage and very fast big data analytics didn't really sink in.
I've spent my holiday break this year learning about open firmware, coreboot, and the secret computer that lives in every computer known as the intel management engine.
I hope we can get to a place where we can trust our hardware again, but Intel needs to allow ME to be completely disabled or we need to find a replacement for Intel chips (from what I gather AMD is not much better).
My next computer will likely be from Purism (or even a Chromebook, they run open firmware)
What I found curious about all histories of the Internet is a scarcity of information on when the name 'Internet' originated. Most narratives just talk about various networks and then suddenly start using the name Internet with no introduction. Others point to its appearance in the name of TCP/IP but not explain its use to denote the network as a whole. Others say that the Internet came into being when arpanet and nsfnet merged, but that feels to much like a post hoc story to me.
Does anyone know when the one single network came to be called Internet and why?
I've read in some TCP/IP basics book (may have been W. Richard Stevens' "TCP/IP Illustrated, vol. 1", I don't know) that it may have derived from catenet (concatenated network) [1].
I wasn’t around for it, but I always noticed how you could date someone based on whether they call it “Internet” (like “interstate”) or “The Internet” like everyone my age and younger does.
The name internet came from a protocol allowing LANs to cross communicate. At the time were multiple proprietary local area networks (LANs). Xerox had Ethernet which is why they were one of the earliest contributor to the Internet.
The funny thing is if you look at a map of early Arpanet, there were a bunch of military installations, universities, and Xerox. http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html. Xerox was on the arpanet in 1974 but didn't release ethernet until 1980. Xerox took a long time to productize their technology back in the day.
The internet spun out from arpanet in the early 1980s because the military was worried about college students without security clearance being on their network. I joined Xerox 2 years after it spun out and it was called internet back then.
Around 1990-92, people stopped saying "we have a connection to the internet backbone" and started saying "we have a connection to the internet".
By 1994 we had the concept of a "regional ISP" versus a
"Tier 1 ISP", where the difference was economic and political: a Tier 1 had settlement-free interconnections at major exchanges, because a sufficient percentage of connectors considered them valuable enough as traffic sources/sinks as to be "peers" rather than clients.
We still say "the internet" a lot of the time. The capitalization thing is pretty common with new technologies at least in English. See e.g. Big Data, Open Source, etc. We treat them like proper nouns at first and then, once they become commonplace, we drop the caps because it looks a bit silly to have random capital letters all over the place.
Mostly, it's a reminder that we should use caps in this way judiciously for new stuff.
I lived the book. :-) (Full disclosure: Katie Hafner is a good friend.) Katie is an engaging and skilled observer of the social aspects of our complex society and the people that populate it. Other books of hers that you might like:
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier;
The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community;
A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano;
This book has been on my reading list for a while and I started it today. I'm only a couple of chapters in. Reading about how it was necessary to convince the military to accept their projects is really cool. Are there any similar books/articles covering the adoption of quantum computing?
37 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 85.9 ms ] threadThat makes me feel a bit old given that I knew a lot of people at BBN when I was in school although I didn't really know much about the proto-internet at the time :-)
But you're right. BBN's role has sort of faded into history.
I consider the book to be one of the best general introductions to the history and politics of the establishment of the ARPANET/Internet, but it depends what you're looking for and what your degree of involvement and interest in the history of computing is! Some reviewers consider it a bit dry; I didn't.
You'll learn about the socio-political conditions in the US that led to the establishment of DARPA, the key personalities who drove the effort technically and politically and the invention of packet switching and network protocols.
The book serves as an excellent base for further reading on this era, such as the magisterial biography of JCR Licklider, "The Dream Machine", Steven Levy's "Hackers", John Markoff's bizarre and entertaining "What The Dormouse Said".
I find people in our industry don't always know history of how things came to be, this is a good book to get some of the earliest networking history.
9/11 changed the tone of the culture. Not just on the Internet. Underground raves, for example, pretty much died out on account of the more serious powers and tone given to law enforcement. Air travel will never be the same. Traveling in general -- we Canadians used to be able to cross the border to the U.S. with just a driver's license. Awful Anti-Islamic hate speech is practically mainstream. An authoritarian streak has entrenched itself in the continent's politics, starting in the Bush era and radically deepening now.
What's happened on the Internet is only one symptom of this.
Individual politicians fought these efforts to bring some of them down (in the case of Clipper, a surprising mix from John Kerry , our 2004 US democratic Presidential candidate, to John Ashcroft (!) who later became GWB’s attorney general and completely changed positions , supporting STELLAR WIND which was revealed by Snowden).
The EFF (formed after Sundevil and funded by Mitch Kapor’s Lotus 1-2-3’a fortunes), Wired magazine (much more iconoclastic in the 90s), 2600 magazine, Phrack, and the ACLU all did much to educate people about the risks. For a time, we listened.
STELLAR WIND was when the 1960s-era Military SIGINT programs like ECHELON melded with broad domestic surveillance. The populace was too angry and fearful to stop it in the mid aughts.
Similar to how the military industrial complex grew regardless of who was politically in charge, the security establishment has become an end onto itself that accelerated once terrorism scored a major blow on 9/11. Or maybe it was a glimpse of today’s cynicism of wanting unlimited power/deficits/surveillance/Executive orders/military options for your own party when it controls the presidency, but not the other party.
There probably was a window in the 90s to mid aughts where things weren’t well under control, but funding after 9/11 fixed that.
It will require an educated electorate and major mandate given to a future congress and president to undo this situation, and it likely will require sustainment over 3 or 4 terms to stick. Which is to say: The realm of remote possibility, but not likely. Adapt accordingly.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDgIpSFtUos
[2] ETA: Agreed, Eyes in the Sky is a great book detailing Gorgon Stare, but that requires pre-deployment of drone(s) and only became operational this decade. I agree it's situational irony that people saw Enemy of the State as a roadmap rather than as a cautionary tale.
For some background about gorgon stare and WAMI (wide area motion imagery): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
Bizarrely enemy of the state directly provided the inspiration.
I mean, you just can't trust your computer any more. Even if its bought "brand new". NSA can put monitoring chips in it, mid-shipment.
That killed computing - and the Internet - for a lot of people, in my sphere.
I hope we can get to a place where we can trust our hardware again, but Intel needs to allow ME to be completely disabled or we need to find a replacement for Intel chips (from what I gather AMD is not much better).
My next computer will likely be from Purism (or even a Chromebook, they run open firmware)
To me it was kind of like the closing of a somewhat utopian-perspective era that started in the mid-90s.
Does anyone know when the one single network came to be called Internet and why?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenet
The funny thing is if you look at a map of early Arpanet, there were a bunch of military installations, universities, and Xerox. http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html. Xerox was on the arpanet in 1974 but didn't release ethernet until 1980. Xerox took a long time to productize their technology back in the day.
The internet spun out from arpanet in the early 1980s because the military was worried about college students without security clearance being on their network. I joined Xerox 2 years after it spun out and it was called internet back then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_Computer_Network
By 1994 we had the concept of a "regional ISP" versus a "Tier 1 ISP", where the difference was economic and political: a Tier 1 had settlement-free interconnections at major exchanges, because a sufficient percentage of connectors considered them valuable enough as traffic sources/sinks as to be "peers" rather than clients.
Mostly, it's a reminder that we should use caps in this way judiciously for new stuff.
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier;
The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community;
A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano;
Mother Daughter Me: A Memoir.