Forty years ago, on 29 October 1969,
a network link was established between two mainframe computers, one in
the University of California, Los Angeles and the other at the Stanford
Research Institute, both in the US, through a system known as "data
packet switching". This network was known as the ARPANET, because
the idea originated within an informal research group at the United States
Government's Department of Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
This group was led by the head of the agency, J.C.R. Licklider, a visionary
scientist who as early as 1960 had called for a network of computers,
connected to one another by wide-band communication lines, which he anticipated
could provide the functions of libraries as well as information storage
and retrieval and other symbiotic functions.
ARPANET became the technical core of what would eventually become the
Internet. The problem was one of connecting separate physical networks
to form one logical network. By 1973, a system was worked out, whereby
the differences between network protocols were hidden by using a common
"internetworking protocol", which meant that the concept of
the network could be separated from its physical implementation. This
spread of internetworking began to form into a global network that eventually
came to be called "the Internet", based on standardised protocols
that were officially implemented in 1982.
Originally the development and use of the internet was confined to the
military, the government and some privileged universities in the US. Over
the 1980s the technology and the networking possibilities began to be
spread across the world. ARPANET was overtaken by the rapidity of technological
change elsewhere, and the project ended in 1990 to be replaced by newer
networking technologies. Commercial activities were allowed by the US
Congress in 1992, leading to the emergence of private internet service
providers and new commercial applications. By the end of the 1980s, the
internet had entered Asia, with institutions in Japan, Singapore, China
and even Thailand becoming early users.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist working in the European government-funded
CERN in Geneva, invented a network-based implementation of hypertext that
could find and organise files and information, effectively becoming a
way of organising the internet. He made this technology publicly available,
and it resulted in the World Wide Web. The computer he used at CERN became
the first Web server. Web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape were developed
in the early 1990s.
The rest is not yet history, because technological change in this area
continues apace, and is even now dispersed to many parts of the world.
Although the original development was largely concentrated in official
defence and scientific circles, subsequently invention and innovation
has become extraordinarily decentralised, so much so that the legions
of books on the history of the internet find it difficult to record the
developments accurately and comprehensively.
New technologies and applications are constantly being developed, and
the remarkable possibilities that already have been opened up by instantaneous
human communication almost defy imagination. It has been said that the
internet is as much a collection of communities as it is a collection
of technologies, and the technology is being constantly pushed in particular
directions by meeting needs of these internet communities as well as using
members to further develop the technology.
The euphoria generated by this and related technologies was at least partly
responsible for the dotcom bubble, which led to significant overinvestment
in some commercial applications that could not generate profits. However,
while the bursting of that bubble did lead to an economic recession in
2000 and 2001, the proliferation of technological development has continued.
And meanwhile it has changed the contours of human life with amazing rapidity.
While the digital divide does indeed remain a major issue, those who have
access to the internet have found their lives transformed. For many people
who keep discovering or benefiting from particular applications, it can
seem to be too good to be true.
The development of mobile phone technology has changed the nature of access,
as more and more people in the developing world turn to mobile phones
to access the internet. In developing Asia, it is estimated that the majority
of internet users now access by phone rather than computer.
Email is often considered to be the most successful internet application,
though it actually predates the internet. Other applications have multiplied
and changed life so quickly that it must have significant social implications.
The internet has changed the way people keep in touch with each other,
find out about each other or about anything else, learn, work, purchase
goods and services, handle many aspects of daily life, listen to music,
find other entertainment, even make friends.
Obviously the technology is going to keep on changing. But while we can
all celebrate this wonderful technology that has already shown so much
potential for transformation, the hard questions about the internet may
emerge now. The very success of the internet has meant that there are
many more people (and companies) with diverse interests who have a stake
in it. Although non-commercial use remains high, the internet is increasingly
becoming a support structure for commercial services provided for profit,
and this is intensified by the fact that its own services are increasingly
becoming commodities.
Already there are debates about how the internet should be controlled
and how to maintain the decentralisation that has been so productive and
implicitly democratic. There are conflicts over domain name space, the
form of the next generation IP addresses, the control of content that
appears on the internet, and much else. If the internet is really to remain
too good to be true, these are questions that must concern all of us.