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Hobbes'
Internet Timeline v5.2
Being
Digital by Negroponte By
The Numbers With Nicholas Negroponte
'City
of Bits' by William Mitchell |
The
Internet and How it Grew...
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"It's
a biological phenomenon. The Internet is not a vertebrate. It acts a
lot like slime mold, growing in all directions without anyone in charge.
Every time I try to describe the Internet to anyone, everyone assumes
I'm having a hippie mystic vision!"
John Perry Barlow, National Net '93
In
1984 there were around thousand Internet hosts, in '87, about ten thousand,
and in '89, one hundred thousand ...and this almost exponential growth
happened before the Net really took off in the early 90s. The 90s saw
an enormous growth in both Internet Service Providers (ISPs), content
providers, and in numbers of people accessing the Net. Cyber
doyen Nicholas Negroponte predicted that a billion people would be
plugged into the Net by the year 2000. Even though there are many reasons, then and now to be sceptical of his faith,
what Negroponte's overly optimistic prediction points to is an enormous
societal shift from the late 80s. Then most of us had never considered the
Internet as an important communications network. Now the Internet is looking set to replace or augment almost every
form of distance communication. It is having an impact on every facet of life in the Western world. This growth in public awareness has grown
out of two main factors -- firstly, the introduction of email and of graphical
browsers such as Netscape; and secondly, an enormous amount of media attention
-- often amounting to rampant cyberbole. And, just as pundits such as Negroponte,
Douglas Rushkoff and Bill Mitchell have all hailed the roll-out of digital
networks as the beginning of a new, more egalitarian, era in human history,
so too, other writers have reacted with fear and loathing. Writers like
Clifford Stoll and Brian Appleyard see the Internet as harbinger of the
collapse of society and as signaling a general retreat from corporeal reality
into fantasy. |
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Such
oppositional stances are not new -- indeed a case can be made that technological
innovations tend initially to be greeted as saviors, as agencies which will
revolutionise every aspect of human existence -- and then the counter-revolution
hits and they are equally castigated, blamed for everything that is wrong
in the world. We have already seen that cinema (and later, television),
for example, was and continues to be blamed for everything from increases
in violence, serial and mass killings to childhood obesity and marriage
breakdown. |
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Equally,
new communications technologies have almost always spurred utopian visions:
the telephone, for instance, was portrayed in an 1881 Scientific American
article as producing a 'new kinship of humanity", whilst H. G. Wells predicted
that it would reduce traffic jams. Other writers were concerned that telephones
would weaken the fabric of society, increase alienation and decrease the
level of social civility and exchange as individuals kept to their homes,
replacing face to face interaction with superficial telephone communication.
In regard to the rhetorics of world connectivity and enhanced creativity
which have been woven around the Net, there are even more recent parallels.
Mark Surman, in his history of cable television, points out numerous uses
of the web ubiquitous 'Super highway' metaphor as well as remarkably similar
visions for cable's future. He writes: |
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"Some envisioned two-way, switched, common carrier information networks
on which everyone could say their piece. others saw an international
network of networks made up of cable systems from around the world.
Still others imagined a new world of home shopping, home voting, home
banking, facsimile newspapers that would 'roll-off' a television set,
movies on demand, electronic mail, interactive computer information
services, and digital libraries. And because real two-way cable systems
were actually up and running on a trial basis in a number of small American
cities, many people believed that these services would be available
within a few years. The cable revolution was a chance to grab hold of
tomorrow today."
Of
course what actually happened is that a few mega-companies bought up the
small companies and transformed cable's potential 'many to many' communication
straight back to the traditional 'few to many' broadcasting model.
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Today,
many fear that that is exactly what is happening with the Internet. Across
the Western world, governments are encouraging the use of the Internet as
a primarily business preserve; corporations and businesses of all kinds
are moving on-line and experimenting with various models to turn the daggy
old Internet beloved by academics and geeks wanting to chat about star trek
into a glossy milch cow. One of the first symptoms of the invasion of big
business was in 1992 when American presidential candidate Al Gore made the
uptake of digital networks a core part of his campaign -- his promise was
'to pave the Information Superhighway'. Gore's metaphor sums up a moment
when the Internet was seen as uncharted territory, a new frontier which
needed to be transformed from the individual user-tracks of BBS's and mailing
lists into the digital equivalent of the modern postindustrial landscapes.
A domain where big business and trans-national corporations would tell us
where to go and what to buy once we got there. A network of supermalls,
casinos, cineplexes and sex services owned by a few to profit from the global
market. |
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At
this time the Net was governed by 'Acceptable Use Policies' which explicitly
banned Internet usage aimed at profit making. This has been conveniently
forgotten as one corporation after another has, through the media, replaced
it with a picture in which most commercial transactions take place on-line
-- and, of course, for a fee. Even our very own beneficent state government
poured millions of dollars into commercial enterprise to assist them to
tap the financial potential of the Net. In 1998 the Liberal minister for
education unveiled a vision of an educational future in which bricks and
mortar schools are all sold to developers whilst children learn at home
from the Internet, when he launched the first satellite suburb deliberately
planned with a cable network and a community centre, but no school as such.
Not only will this be an enormous saving on pesky teachers and other educational
resources, it should also ensure that education is kept out of the hands
and minds of those who don't deserve it -- if you can't afford a computer
and the costs of getting on-line then obviously your children won't need
the benefits of a formal education. |
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At
the same time as media and governments were jumping on the Information Superhighway
bandwagon, many new and traditional users of the net were increasingly strongly
disagreeing, with diverse Internet communities rallying around the slogan
'Information wants to be free'. Many have pointed out that a wholesale transfer
of information and services to the Internet will create greater disparity
between the rich and the poor -- creating an even more stratified society
divided into the information rich and information have-nots. And, if the
old cliché 'Knowledge is power' is anything to go by, the information
poor will effectively be disenfranchised from real-world economic, political
and social life as they are excluded by their financial poverty from digital
domains. |
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Timeline
of the history of communications
World
History Matrix
Time
of the History of Computers and Multimedia
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The
Internet then is contested territory -- and this battle has its roots in
the very evolution of on-line communications. As we have seen over the last
essays, digital technologies and communications have their technological
and conceptual basis in prior technological innovations without which they
would never have been invented. Indeed, that the history of the western
world could be characterised by developments in information technologies
ranging from the invention of written records in the Fertile Crescent of
the Near East some ten thousand years ago, through the pony-express of the
Persians and the distance communications using flaming torches of the Greeks.
The invention of the abacus in the 10th century, the moveable type press
in the 15th, the mechanical calculator and the Jacquard loom in the 18th
to the invention of the telegraph and telephone in the 19th century were
all essential enabling technologies for the so-called 'information revolution'.
Whilst some of these prior innovations were made in response to economic
and social developments the greatest impetus for technology has been war
-- we have seen, for example, how quickly computers were developed in the
immediate lead-up to and during the Second World War. What has usually not
been foreseen during these developmental phases is the uses to which new
technologies will be put during peace time. The Internet, as an offspring
of the Cold War, is no exception. |
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Sputnik
is Launched
Chronology of Sputnik/Vanguard/Explorer Events 1957-58
Behind
the Net - The untold history of the ARPANET t By Michael Hauben
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 The
Cold War continued the wartime flood of a huge amounts of public monies
into the development of a range of technologies. The Russians scared the
American witless when they launched their Sputnik in 1957 and implemented
a new fear of nuclear conquest from space. Americans responded by throwing
money at their own space program and into the development of communications
technologies. Out of this, and in an uncomfortable alliance of the military
and the universities grew ARPANet. (ARPA stands for the Advanced Research
Projects Agency). The military was concerned that in the event of a nuclear
strike their communications network would be wiped out, leaving America
leaderless and therefore essentially defenseless. Centralised control posts
would be the first to go -- and the country would quickly fall in their
wake. The answer was a non-centralised or distributed network of interconnected
communications devices. The theory is easily envisaged if you think of a
fishing net -- all those bits of string held together with knots -- you
can trace your finger along the connecting strings from any point to reach
any other point -- and if there is a hole, you just take a route around
it. The technological innovation which made this reasonably simple concept
a viable reality was a thing called 'packet switching'. |
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How
it works is simple; you're at point A and want to get a message to point
Z. You write your message on your computer generating a stream of '1s' and
'0s' -- when you send your message this gets chopped up into little packets
of data and shot into the network. Each packet is preceded by a destination
code. The packets go bouncing around the network in the general direction
of the destination often passing through multiple network points before
reaching their intended destination where they are recompiled into a humanly
readable form. The packets can share the line with packets from other messages,
and separate packets from the same message may take completely different
routes to arrive at the same destination. This was intended to ensure that
even if large sections of the network were knocked out for whatever reason,
information would still get through to what was left. Of course to work
each of the nodes -- that is the computers connected to the network -- had
to have all the same privileges and powers as each other. Each node had
to be capable of sending, receiving and passing along information. So the
Internet was based on a model of decentralised power -- essentially democratic
in that there is no central computer in charge of all the others. |
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 The
internet was not very sexy to begin with. For a start, its birth in 1969
was completely over-shadowed by the moon landing -- a guy in a spacesuit
makes much better tv than a bunch of labcoated propellorheads clustered
around a large box. But whilst most Western eyes were following Neil Armstrong's
every bounce and bobble, what many now see as a pivotal point in human
history was modestly instigated with four campus-based computers variously
at Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the university
of Utah.
Nuclear
war may have been foremost in the minds of the Defense Department bosses
who paid for and oversaw the project, but it was really of very little importance
to either the researchers or the universities which actually got ARPAnet
up and running. What they were concerned about was computer time-sharing
and before the military knew what was happening the newborn network was
being primarily being used for researchers to access super-computer time
for other, nonmilitary projects. And it was only another another moment
before even these 'serious' uses were competing with the lure of interpersonal
communication via email and mailing lists. |
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Through
the 70s, ARPAnet grew steadily but quietly but by 1981 there were still
only 213 host computers connected. The wonder is that some of them weren't
in America. But it was in the late 70s and early 80s that things really
took off. Many new networks appeared with their own protocols which meant
that they couldn't connect with either ARPAnet or other networks. This was
partially due to the military being more than a little nervous about sharing
their lines with a bunch of pointy-headed academics wanting to chat about
the latest Heinlein novel or play games. In 1983 they split the network
instituting a dedicated military network, Milnet, although they left some
gateways between it and ARPAnet. |
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The
most significant other networks were BITNET which ran only on IBM systems,
and UseNet which was developed for UNIX types to distance-communicate with
each other. Usenet was the first indication that the Internet was about
more than simple information transfer -- that it was about creating communities
of interest which were independent of geographical location. However this
plethora of unconnected networks meant that all sorts of things were being
duplicated as well as allowing possibilities on one network which did not
exist on others. The challenge was to get them to be able to communicate
with each other -- and the killer app with allowed this to happen was called
TCP/IP -- a protocol which allowed computers using different operating systems
to communicate with each other. |
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 It's
hard to remember that the World Wide Web is not the Internet -- although
it has become an increasingly significant part of it. It's also hard to
remember that the Web only sprang into existence in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee
posted the first computer code for it, and only became accessible and attractive
for average humanoids in 1993 with the first release of the Mosaic browser.
So what did people do on-line before they had all those amazingly interesting
corporate sites to browse and animated GIFs to wow them? Well they had email
and listservs of course, but they were doing a lot more besides. Internet
Relay Chat was huge. IRC seems a little daggy now that we have audiochat
and CUSeeMe but the idea of being able to chat for a nominal cost, realtime,
with someone halfway around the world, even if it was in little scraps of
text, was very exciting and still provides the backbone of most MOOs, MUDs,
Mucks and chatlines. Part of the excitement was that many people could chat
simultaneously and people could 'be' whatever they wanted on-line. It didn't
take long before earnest discussions about programming or social issues
transformed into general sociableness and, inevitably, sex. |
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The
physical invisibility of participants was part of the beauty of it all as
it meant that online, people could 'be' whatever they said they were, spotty
nerds could transform themselves into debonair playboys and girls, middle-aged
executives could masquerade as teenage snowboarders, and perfectly ordinary
suburbanites could don the personas of furry animals or mighty warriors.
In Sherry Turkle's book, 'Life on the Screen' one IRC enthusiast
explained its attraction by commenting that when on line she felt more like
who she want to be. Digistar and genderbender, Sandy Stone, has written
at length about the possibilities and pitfalls of multiple and changing
personal identity -- in particular, the case of a supposedly disabled woman
who became the 'backbone' of her MOO dispensing advice, support and homilies
to all and sundry. When she was outed as a middle-aged male psychiatrist
many of her on-line friends felt vastly and intrinsically betrayed and reacted
by exiling her/him from their chat. Almost everything that can happen in
real life could happen in the text spaces of IRC including many of the nastier
aspects including cyber-rape, virtual stalking and vitriolic conflicts.
Equally, on-line communities rallied around sick and dying members, got
information in and out of war zones, and provided many who felt excluded
from mainstream society with a safe and supportive 'virtual community'. |
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When
people weren't chatting they were FTPing -- uploading information and programs
to share with others. It is this history of sharing stuff -- shareware and
freeware programs and games for example -- which is most at risk on the
new net. And then, in 1991 Mark MaCahill and a team at the University of
Minnesota released Gopher. Gopher was, in MaCahill's words, "the first Internet
application my mom can use". In many ways it was the precursor to the web
as we know it; it used a point and click interface to transfer information
directly to the screen. It differed however, in that its structure was essentially
hierarchical -- you had to work your way through embedded indexes to find
what you wanted. And, perhaps more importantly, Gopher could only display
one data type at a time -- you could only get text or only a picture. It
was never pretty, and once Netscape was released with its simultaneous text,
image, sound and interactivity, it pretty much got left behind. |
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The
problem with the Internet was, of course, that all the different possibilities
meant that you had to learn a new program for each -- and none of these
was particularly easy or intuitive. Even with the rapid proliferation of
commercial networks like America On-Line and BusinessNet, the Internet was
very much the haunt of the technophile -- and newbies were made to feel
rather unwelcome. This all changed in 1993 when a very young Marc Andressen
released the first version of Mosaic, a text and graphical browser which
rapidly morphed into Netscape. The Net was already changing, business was
moving in, circling the potential profits to be made. Andressen responded
by doing something which almost ensured that his browser was immediately
popular and which, to boot, stayed with the gift economy ideals of the Net
-- he gave it away -- and in doing so vitalized the web in ways nobody except
a few science fiction writers had ever imagined. |
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He
ensured that people would use it because it was developed collaboratively
with users themselves. Users would not suddenly find themselves being expected
to pay for the browser software as they would proprietary software. Users
could access almost all Net services through one simple and easy to load
and learn system. The Internet boomed. The growing popularity of the Net
and the ease of authoring pages for it made the possibility for self-publishing
available to anyone with the dosh for a computer and an ISP. Its dual history
as the scion of the academic net used for swopping research papers and collaborating
on distance projects and in the hypertext theory and experimentation of
Nelson and Kay has encouraged a model based on print publishing. What we
got was hypertext, rather than hypersound or hyperspace for example. This
has had a profound impact on the way we use the Net, and the sorts of materials
we can find there. |
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One
of its unforeseen effects was the extent to which it would change the face
of Microsoft. In Bill Gate's words,' in 1995 the sleeping giant awoke'.
Long used to holding a monopoly on both operating systems and software,
Microsoft had become fat and complacent. The over-night success of Netscape
and the media hype which followed in its wake convinced them that they needed
a piece of that pie. Criticisms of their newly released Windows95 were hurting
them and attention needed to be diverted elsewhere -- deciding to go into
the Internet business could kill 2 birds at once. Suddenly Gates, who had
been an almost reclusive mystery man started giving interviews on prime-time
television and bluechip publications becoming the most publicly recognisable
figure in the computer industry. he announced that from there on in Microsoft
would not be producing anything which did not center around Internet connectivity.
In an attempt to blow Netscape out of the water, they released their own
browser which they bundled with their systems software thus both encouraging
the mass rush on-line and developing a huge user base. Of course they were
planning to market the browser software just as soon as they had killed
their competition. Their strongarm tactics misfired badly -- Netscape had
become a listed company, which in its first stock market quote had been
so popular that the number of shares issued had to be doubled and Andressen
became a multimillionaire at the age of 24. When Microsoft tried to sabotage
the inclusion of Javascript capability by 'making' their own incompatible
version there was an outcry from the Net community. The Internet Society,
a voluntary international collective of researchers, academics and users
which administers and governs the net, setting protocol standards, refused
to endorse Microsoft's version of Java. Netscape sued them and they found
themselves accused of attempting to monopolise the software market through
unfair trading practices and unethical buyouts. This case is still being
contested and it looks likely that, whilst Microsoft will lose on paper,
their economic position will protect them -- the American government simply
cannot afford to disembowel the company. In the short term however, the
effect of these law suits has been to force Microsoft to rewrite their browser
software, make Microsoft Net open to anyone, and to engage in a number of
high profile cultural and educational activities to muster public support. |
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it looks like the Internet will continue to be contested territory for a
very long time. |
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N
E X T :: Hyper Hypertext <On-line
Sources (not credited within the text) The
Internet Companion A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking by Tracy
LaQuey INFOBAHN
BLUES By Robert Adrian Media
Lullabies: The reinvention of the World Wide Web by Bill Hilf |
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Shiralee
Saul: Originally authored 1998, last updated February 2005
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