Internet

As with many modern innovations, the origins of the Internet and the World Wide Web can be found in the cold war. In 1957 the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, into space. Immediately, the United States responded with significant increases in funding for science and technology. Congress reacted to a public fear that the nation was falling behind the Soviets in technology, thereby making it vulnerable to Soviet aggression. Along with the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of Defense also created a new subagency dedicated to advanced research, called simply the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). It was later renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

At first, the agency’s priorities were dominated by the space race and its subsidiary concerns—ballistic missile defense and nuclear test monitoring. As early as 1962, however, ARPA created the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) to more specifically look into the wider implications of computers and networking. At this point, computers had only just benefited from the invention of the integrated circuit, and thus still relied on vast commitments of space, energy, and manpower to operate. For the sake of efficiency, IPTO formally sponsored a study to look into the possibility of joining these huge computers through a network in order to take advantage of time-sharing and data transfers. By 1965 Lawrence G. Roberts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology submitted the blueprints for a preliminary network design dubbed ARPANET. Shortly thereafter, ARPA awarded a $1 million construction contract to a then-small private corporation, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN). It took four years to build ARPANET, but in 1969 the company had tied four computers together to form the first network, joining the National Measurement Center of the University of California at Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

Throughout the 1970s, the ARPANET grew in both size and capabilities. In 1972 Ray Tomlinson wrote the first electronic messaging (e-mail) program, and Lawrence Roberts wrote the first e-mail managing software. E-mail not only increased communication between researchers, but also aided in shifting the network’s purpose away from the time-sharing of resources, toward a new model of scientific collaboration. Within a year, there were more than 2,000 users of ARPANET, and e-mail made up 75 percent of all network traffic. In 1974 BBN opened the network to the public through Telenet. However, since personal computers were not commonly introduced until the early 1980s, Telenet remained primarily an academic and research tool. By 1981 a number of other nongovernment networks began to utilize the backbone of communication provided by ARPANET including THEORYNET, BIT-NET, CSNET, and USENET. These were independent networks, and could communicate with each other only indirectly. Nevertheless, the network became so popular that by 1983 DARPA divided itself into two separate entities: MILNET, which served its original intention as a safe and secure communication network for the government; and ARPANET, which remained the primary network for academic and research institutions. Almost two-thirds of the 113 existing nodes were dedicated to MILNET. With the rapid increase of personal computers in the public market, the demand rose dramatically and the ratio shifted. By 1984 there were more than 1,000 network hosts on ARPANET.

Through the early years of ARPANET, the federal government played a primary role in both planning and funding. The vast majority of users and developers were scientists and academics, even though the Department of Defense carried most of the financial support. In 1986 the National Science Federation (NSF) replaced the DARPA as the primary agency funding the network and created its own NSFNET. In 1987 NSF commissioned the management of the network to a private corporation, Merit Network, Inc. That same year, the first commercial network access provider, UUNET, also started. DARPA maintained its intimate relationship with the network through the formation of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), which assumes responsibility for managing large-scale network problems (or virus attacks). The federal government continues to assert itself in the network in other less obvious ways, such as requiring government contractors to adopt specific network standards, which help promulgate network access. In 1987 there were 10,000 hosts, in 1988 there were 60,000, and in 1989 there were more than 100,000. By 1990, the success of commercially based Internet access providers allowed ARPANET to shut down, leaving NSFNET and private network hosts to support the existing network infrastructure. The following year, Congress passed the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which provided considerable funding for the support of existing public networks, and encouraged the creation of additional private networks. The act also established the National Research and Education Network (NREN), which provides for separate high-speed networking for noncommercial research purposes. Senator Albert Gore, Jr. (D-Tenn.), sponsored the bill, which later led him to exaggerate his role in “inventing” the Internet. In fact, the networks upon which the World Wide Web relies had been in existence in one form or another since 1970. The additional federal support of the Computer Act of 1991 did, however, help to increase the number of Internet hosts to more than 1 million by 1992. Very quickly, private and commercial Internet access providers become the primary network carriers, and the federal backbone, NSFNET, managed to revert back to a strictly academic resource by 1995.

The World Wide Web, or the Internet, as we know it today, officially began in March 1989 as a project led by Tim Berners-Lee of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, or CERN). They did not create a network, but instead invented a management system by which all existing networks might be more easily navigated. CERN’s stated goal was to develop a software and hardware system that allowed researchers to quickly access existing collaboration projects and to leave lasting contributions before exiting. The project was executed in two phases: The first used existing hardware and software systems to implement simple browsers that could access each user’s workstation; the second merely expanded the application area and allowed users to add their own material. The result was a management system that allowed users on one computer to automatically access information stored on another through existing international networks, without the need of special protocols. It was based on a system called “hypertext,” which was originally conceived by Vannevar Bush in 1945, as an inevitable consequence of computerized archiving. He predicted that there would be so much data stored in national record banks that a computer based on nonsequential addressing would have to be developed to access it. Ted Nelson in 1960 coined the label “hypertext” to describe an interactive form of writing. The ideas of both Bush and Nelson served as the basis for CERN’s management system, which links related pieces of information in a way that allows easy access to all types of files, regardless of their location. After three years, CERN released the World Wide Web (WWW) system to the public in 1992. It found immediate success, and the next year, Marc Andreessen, from the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois, developed a graphical user interface to the WWW, called “Mosaic for X.” Numerous entrepreneurs imitated the “browser,” and the World Wide Web soon became a public property.

As of 2008 there were more than 1.4 billion users on the Internet from 170 countries, with more than 100 million Web sites (an imprecise figure that rises at geometric rates). Though the U. S. federal government played a large role in the creation and establishment of the Internet, it is now an international phenomenon, larger than any single nation. Even U. S. governmental contributions relied heavily on academic initiative and outsourcing. In 1996, Congress passed its first wide-reaching regulation on the Internet with the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which intended to prohibit underage access to PORNOGRAPHY by holding site owners criminally responsible for violations of decency. The following year, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down the CDA’s Internet provision in Reno v. ACLU, concluding that it was an unconstitutional limitation on free speech, political discourse, and intellectual freedom. As of 2001 the decency provisions had not been revived, though they were often discussed in the public forum. Other attempts at government regulation have generally met with stiff resistance.

As the number of public Internet users skyrocketed, new forms of reporting and social networking began to emerge. One form of social networking especially popular among college-age people featured Web sites where Internet users could enter personal information to which other users had access. This became a common way for people to keep in touch with a large network of Internet users simultaneously. Among new forms of reporting were weblogs, or “blogs,” a series of content entries displayed in reverse chronological order. The earliest blogs were personal online diaries, but blog content has gradually diversified to include political commentary, journalistic-style reporting, travel logs, and many other topics of personal interest.

By 2001 many Internet users obtained at least part of their political news from popular blogs like Political Wire and Instapundit. Blogs slowly gained credibility as a news source and a way of reaching new demographics. Political candidates, most notably Howard Dean, began writing campaign blogs in 2004 as a nontraditional means of advertising and fund-raising. Perhaps even more indicative of their increasing acceptance as a popular information source, bloggers were admitted as journalists to both 2004 party conventions. Some bloggers crossed over into mainstream media as political pundits, and many mainstream media personalities added blogs to their Web sites. Bloggers often quoted and responded to one another’s postings, creating a network of content known as the blogosphere. Mainstream media monitored this blog traffic and occasionally reported on popular content. The blogosphere will likely remain a new source of news content and commentary on popular culture. In 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama capitalized on this popular Internet tool to inform supporters and to raise campaign funds.

Newspaper publishers have felt the effects of the Internet revolution, as online newsmagazines, newspapers, and television and radio broadcasts have claimed a greater share of the news market. With the ability to access up-to-date information at any time of day, Internet users have begun seeking news from Internet sites more readily than newspapers or broadcast stations, and newspaper sales and subscriptions have fallen precipitously.

See also BUSINESS; censorship; Human Genome Project; media; property rights; science and

TECHNOLOGY.

Further reading: Internet Society. A Brief History of the Internet. Available online. URL: Http://www. isoc. org/Inter-net/history/brief. shtml. Accessed January 6, 2009; National Science Foundation. Internet. Available online. URL: Http://www. nsf. gov/about/history/nsf0050/Internet/Inter-net. htm. Accessed January 6, 2009.

—Aharon W. Zorea and Amy Wallhermfechtel