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To be able to use the Internet well, you need a reasonably accurate model of how it works. A good place to start is a reasonably accurate picture of what the Internet looks like. How big is it? Where is it? How is everything connected?
Learn more about who runs the Internet.
The Internet is not about technology. The Internet is about
sharing information, it's about publishing, it's about interaction.
-- Gerry McGovern
When
is the computer that you're using connected to other computers?
When connected,
what information is passing over that connection?
Is that
information protected from eavesdropping and alteration?
What can you
know about the other sites or persons you're connected to?
What can they
know about you?
Two hundred years ago, an electrical circuit was set up between Paris and Lille, France. Not long after, Allesandro Volta first made electricity. A hundred and eighty years ago, Michael Faraday got electricity and magnets to work together and drew a picture of what he'd done. A hundred and sixty-some years ago, Samuel Morse sent the first binary code -- dots and dashes -- over an electrical circuit. The telegraph was the first binary electrical network; the Internet is the most recent binary electrical network.
Telephoneteca's chronological guide to major telecom events since 1820 and history of the telephone: Alexander Graham Bell: what have you started?
With the exception of some very successful guerilla armies, a successful military force always has a central command-and-control structure. The telephone system is not unlike that, with the intelligence at the center and a company-issued handset at the edge.
The Nature of the Public Voice Network
Conceptually, every telephone in the world is connected to every other telephone. These connections are either physically or via some other transmission technologies such as microwave, radiowave, light, etc. One can imagine 2 persons, each with a tin can connected by a string talking to one another. The real picture is not much different than that other than a little more complicated.
Telephoneteca's Description of a Telephone System
The central office (C.O.) is at one end of the local network while your home telephone is at the other end. As the originating location and nucleus of your telephone system, the central office is the most complex area of the local network, yet all the home telephone user really needs to know about the central office is what functions is provides
During the cold war in the 1950's, the U.S. military had a problem. What if the Russians bombed the center? As another example, the new interstate highway system was great, but there were only a couple of bridges over the Mississippi River. If the Russians bombed the bridge, the fancy highway system on either bank wasn't worth much.
The military relied on the telephone system to communicate. It uses the tin can model, you know, two tin cans with a string between. The farther away the tin cans, the louder you need to shout. Snip the string and the circuit is broken and the communication is over. It happens on Mother's Day, when "all circuits are busy. Please try your call again later." Faced with the Russian bomb, the U.S. military could not armor-plate, protect, or otherwise secure every telephone pole and wire in the country.
Paul Baran of the RAND
Institute proposed in 1964 a whole new way of
thinking about networks in his report called "On Distributed
Communications: 1. Introduction to Distributed Communications Network".
Instead of circuits, he proposed packets. Instead of a network with a center (on
the left), he proposed a network without a center (on the right), what he called
a distributed network.
Heterarchy -- a form of organization resembling a
network or fishnet. Authority is determined by knowledge and function.
Hierarchy -- a form of organization resembling a pyramid. Authority is
determined by position in the pyramid, each level subordinate to the one above
it.
Bruce Sterling explains the principles in his Short History of the Internet.
The network itself would be assumed to be unreliable
at all times. It would be designed from the get-go to transcend its own
unreliability.
All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each
node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages.
The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately
addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at
some other specified destination node. Each packet would wind its way through
the network on an individual basis. The particular route that the packet took
would be unimportant. Only final results would count.
To remove a possible means of enemy spying, the network's nodes would retain no information about the traffic passing through. Sterling goes on to use Baran's hot-potato analogy:
Basically, the packet would be tossed like a hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply wouldn't matter; the packets would still stay airborne, lateralled wildly across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive. This rather haphazard delivery system might be "inefficient" in the usual sense ... but it would be extremely rugged.
It took another twenty years for the widespread adoption of the rules, or the protocol, that made Baran's vision a reality. These rules are technical rules, not social or political or commercial rules. It turned out that the rules that avoided enemy spying in war time also work against their peace time equivalents: censorship and control. The powerful people at the top of social, political, and commercial organizations such as libraries, governments, and music distribution companies would like to maintain control. Note they always call it something else. Librarians call it access. Governments call it crime prevention. Record labels call it copyrights. However, the genie is out of the bottle and it isn't going back in.
How
Internet core routers deliver
by Alan Zeichick
Red Herring, August 15, 2001
Ever wonder how data speeds along the Web's edge and core? As an analogy, your local post office is a good place to start.
Learn more about the history of the Internet.
Atlases of Cyberspaces' Historical Maps of ARPANET and the Internet
Charting
the Virtual World
by Sari Kalin
Darwin magazine, April 2002
Cyberspace is the latest frontier to attract the attention
of mapmakers.
Why is it so important for us to know what the Web looks like?
During Renaissance times, if you wanted a map of the New World, you couldn't
just walk into a Barnes & Noble and pick up a little something from Rand
McNally. You had to sail across the Atlantic and draw the map yourself. Today,
the same do-it-yourself spirit is required of anyone who wants to map
cyberspace.
This project was created to make a visual representation of a space
that is very much one-dimensional, a metaphysical universe. The data represented
and collected here serves a multitude of purposes: Modeling the Internet,
analyzing wasted IP space, IP space distribution, detecting the result of
natural disasters, weather, war, and esthetics/art.
Powerful
Attack Cripples Servers
by Ted Bridis
AP News, October 23, 2002
Nine of the 13 computer servers that manage global Internet
traffic were crippled by a powerful electronic attack this week, officials said.
But most Internet users didn't notice because the attack only lasted an hour.
Its origin was not known, and the FBI and White House were investigating.
One official described Monday's attack as the most sophisticated and large-scale
assault against these crucial computers in the history of the Internet.
Seven of the 13 servers failed to respond to legitimate network traffic and two
others failed intermittently during the attack, officials confirmed. ...
The 13 computers are spread geographically across the globe as precaution
against physical disasters and operated by U.S. government agencies,
universities, corporations and private organizations.
"As best we can tell, no user noticed and the attack was dealt with and life
goes on," said Louis Touton, vice president for the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet's key governing body. ...
Richard Clarke, President Bush's top cyber-security adviser and head of the
protection board, has warned for months that an attack against the Internet's 13
so-called root server computers could be greatly disruptive.
These experts said the attack, which started about 4:45 p.m. EDT Monday,
transmitted data to each targeted root server 30 to 40 times normal amounts. One
said that just one additional failure would have disrupted e-mails and Web
browsing across parts of the Internet.
The POTS (plain old telephone system) is a circuit-switched network. It uses an analog signal: wavelengths.
a dedicated channel (or circuit) is established for the duration of a transmission. The most ubiquitous circuit-switching network is the telephone system, which links together wire segments to create a single unbroken line for each telephone call.
The Internet is a packet-switched network. It uses a digital "signal": bits.
Messages are divided into packets before they are sent. Each packet is then transmitted individually and can even follow different routes to its destination. Once all the packets forming a message arrive at the destination, they are recompiled into the original message.
The analog voice telephone network has all the intelligence inside -- the phone company's central switching offices. The telephone network is stupid at the edges; you can't do much with your telephone unless you add on an answering machine that's not part of the network.
The digital data network has all the intelligence at the edges, your PC. It's stupid in the middle, just a bit conveyor. As of October 2002, the Economist reported that there were 228,265 routers, that is computers moving packets to the next router.
Rise of the
Stupid Network
by David Isenberg
Why the Intelligent Network was once a good idea, but isn't anymore. One telephone company nerd's odd perspective on the changing value proposition
World of Ends: What
the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else
by Doc Searls and David Weinberger
The Internet is not a thing. It's an agreement. ...
If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so
boneheaded about it?
Could it be because the three Internet virtues are the antithesis of how
governments and businesses view the world?
Nobody owns it: Businesses are defined by what they own, as governments are
defined by what they control.
Everybody can use it: In business, selling goods means transferring exclusive
rights of use from the vendor to the buyer; in government, making laws means
imposing restrictions on people.
Anybody can improve it: Business and government cherish authorized roles. It's
the job of only certain people to do certain things, to make the right changes.
Business and government by their natures are predisposed to misunderstand the
Internet's nature.
Netheads
versus Bellheads: Chapter One
T.M.Denton, François Ménard and David Isenberg
Paradigm
Shift for the Stupid Network: Interconnecting with Legacy Networks in the
Internet Era (.pdf)
T.M. Denton and François Ménard
... on the need for regulators to understand that the end-to-end architecture of the Internet needs to be protected against the central-planning model of telephony and cable television.
Metcalfe's Law: as the number of a network's nodes increases arithmetically, the whole network's value increases exponentially.
People are very hazy about exactly what the Internet is and how the World Wide Web is part of it. Here's a good question: Why do you plug it into the phone line rather than the electrical outlet? The answer is very geeky, so we find familiar metaphors comforting. For example, the "engine" in search engine isn't to be taken literally, nor are Web "page" and "visiting" a Web site. What does "log on" mean?
Information Highway is another. If people don't know anything about the Internet, they form a mental model based on the highway metaphor. How useful is it?
Fortunately, the Internet and Web are new enough that we can still hear from the pioneers who developed them. Back in the 1970's, Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf had as much to do with it as anyone. In the last presidential election year, they contributed to the Internet Policy Institute's Briefing for the New President. Their article, What Is The Internet (And What Makes It Work), is not easy to read, especially in the middle part. But it's about as authoritative as you can get and will, I hope, contradict some of your current mental model.
Learn more about Internet architecture.
The short answer is pictures.
Thanks to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen. For the full story, I recommend Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee (with Mark Fischetti). This excerpt from Chapter One: Enquire Within upon Everything stops right where the chapter gets interesting. You can fill in more by reading Interview with the Web's Creator by Chris Oakes or by listening to the audio version. Or try Information Management: A Proposal by Tim Berners-Lee, which he presented to CERN in March 1989. He and Robert Cailliau refined it later the following year. The outcome of this proposal was the invention of the World Wide Web.
The current incompatibilities of the platforms and tools make it impossible to access existing information through a common interface, leading to waste of time, frustration and obsolete answers to simple data lookup. There is a potential large benefit from the integration of a variety of systems in a way which allows a user to follow links pointing from one piece of information to another one. This forming of a web of information nodes rather than a hierarchical tree or an ordered list is the basic concept behind HyperText.
from the November 1990 report by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau to CERN titled World-Wide Web: Proposal for a HyperText Project
to provide a common (simple) protocol for requesting human readable information stored at a remote system, using networks;
to provide a protocol within which information can automatically be exchanged in a format common to the supplier and the consumer;
to provide some method of reading at least text (if not graphics) using a large proportion of the computer screens in use at CERN;
t
o provide and maintain at least one collection of
documents, into which users may (but are not bound to) put their documents.
This collection will include much existing data;
to provide a keyword search option, in addition to navigation by following references, using any new or existing indexes. The result of a keyword search is simply a hypertext document consisting of a list of references to nodes which match the keywords;
to allow private individually managed collections of documents to be linked to those in other collections;
to use public domain software wherever possible, or interface to proprietary systems which already exist;
to provide the software for the above free of charge to anyone.
the 1991 Newsgroup message announcing the WorldWideWeb:
WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary
From: t...@info.cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee)
Newsgroups: alt.hypertext
Date: 6 Aug 91 16:00:12 GMT
The WWW project merges the techniques of information
retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.
The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be
freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within
internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support
groups.
Tim
Berners-Lee Finally Gets His Due
by Victoria Shannon
E-Commerce Times, June 15, 2004
If Tim Berners-Lee had decided to patent his idea in 1989, the Internet
would be a different place. Instead, the World Wide Web became free to
anyone who could make use of it. ...
Because he and his colleague, Robert Cailliau, a Belgian, insisted on a
license-free technology, today a Gateway computer with a Linux operating
system and a browser made by Netscape can see the same Web page as any other
personal computer, system software or Internet browser.
The long answer to "Why the Web?" is too long for our purposes here, but reading a little about Douglas Englebart will give you a taste. He invented and demonstrated the mouse, videoconferencing, networked collaboration, hypermedia, hyperlinks, and digital text editing in 1968. Don't you wish you'd been there in 1968 knowing what you know now? Well, then take a look at what Englebart is researching these days at his Bootstrap Institute.
WWW10:
Web work far from done, Berners-Lee warns
by Stephen Lawson
Infoworld, April 30, 2001
After ... more than 10 years of work, the Web is not done yet, said Web pioneer and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Director Tim Berners-Lee, kicking off the 10th World Wide Web Conference.
The Click Heard Round The World
by Douglas Englebart
Wired, January 2004
I trace the origin of my ideas to 1950, when I began what I
call my crusade. ...
All of a sudden - wham! - I got an image of myself sitting at a big CRT
screen with all kinds of symbols on it, new and different ones, manipulated by a
computer that could be operated through various input devices. All the material
on the screen could be controlled with great flexibility. Other people had their
display units tied to the same computer complex, and you could connect them.
Everybody could share knowledge. The vision unfolded rapidly, in about a half
hour, and suddenly the potential of interactive, collaborative computing became
totally clear. ...
It took almost 20 years for me to get the support I needed to build a working
prototype. ...
We weren't interested in "automation" but in "augmentation." We were not just
building a tool, we were designing an entire system for working with knowledge.
Automation means if you're milking a cow, you get a tool that will milk it for
you. But to augment the milking of a cow, you invent the telephone. The
telephone not only changes how you milk, but the rest of the way you work as
well. It touches the entire process. It was a paradigm shift.
Brief
History of the Domain Name System
Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Internet; newsgroups; and smileys, such as :-) also called emoticons
January 1 - the ARPANET officially switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP. Six months later, the ARPANET was split into the two subnets ARPANET and MILNET, which were connected by Internet gateways (routers).
The first use of the Domain Name System (DNS) took place on June 23, 1983 at the University of Southern California School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI).
DNS system adopted to map IP numbers to human-language names. It
is the protocol that all Internet users depend on for sending email and locating
web resources.
As the world’s largest and busiest distributed database, the DNS handles
billions of requests every day and was the first proof that database replication
could be invisible and reliable on a global scale. Learn more
addresses ending in .edu and .gov as well as .com, which was intended as a catch-all and not something that would ever be popular
addresses ending in .net; public access through the WELL - Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
addresses ending in .org
Archie, what we now call a search engine
October 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau present report to CERN titled World-Wide Web: Proposal for a HyperText Project (see key goals above)
November 1990, the first Web client (browser) able to display documents using multiple fonts and styles. Also able to edit documents.
Deja Vu - Experience
the history of the web!
Go to
the emulator
to re-live an era in the history of the web!
Or go to the
timeline to read about the old times!
May 17, the "birth" of the Web according to Tim Berners-Lee in Weaving the Web.
December 1991, the CERN Computer Newsletter announced and described the Web to the high-energy physics community
Turning
on the World Wide Web
by Paul Festa
CNET News.com, December 10, 2001
In 1991, "I was visiting the laboratory called CERN, in
Geneva, Switzerland ... and a guy by the name of Tim Berners-Lee asked me to
come see him demonstrate the application he'd just written called the World Wide
Web.
"When I saw what Tim Berners-Lee had done, I said, 'This is all well and
good, but will it work over the Internet?' And Tim said, 'Of course--it's
designed for that.' I said, 'Show me.' But he said the only problem is that all
the Web servers in the world were in that same building."
It was at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) that particle physicist Paul Kunz wrote
and posted the first
American Web page 10 years ago today. As an aside to his work smashing and
studying subatomic particles, Kunz set up the first Web server outside Western
Europe as a way of providing easier access to a database of scientific paper
abstracts.
WWW, http:// (URLs), home page
February 1993, Mosaic (web browser); HTML
search engine; web page; Internet service provider (ISP); cgi-bin
May 1994, the First International WWW Conference was held at CERN
public chat room, though AOL had private, proprietary chat as early as 1993
April 1995, the National Science Foundation shut off NSFNET, the Internet as a government-funded research experiment. The Internet backbone passed into the private domain and became a multi-use network of networks.
Dot-com registrations exceed dot-edu registrations; start of the commercial Web
Country codes for domain names
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