White Paper

 
List 1.  Milestones of the Development of Internet

  • 1969, original network (50 Kbps) constructed linking 4 nodes sponsored by ARPA

  • 1972, first e-mail program created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN; @ was chosen to represent at

  • 1973, development of Internet protocol led by Vinton Cerf (Stanford) and Bob Kahn (DARPA); Bob Metcalfe's Harvard PhD Thesis outlines idea for Ethernet. The concept was tested on Xerox PARC's Alto computers, and the first Ethernet network, called the Alto Aloha System

  • 1974, first use of the term Internet by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn in their TCP paper, IEEE Trans. Comm.; BBN offers Telnet service

  • 1976, DARPA requires TCP/IP for use in ARPANET

  • 1978, TCP protocol splits into TCP and IP  

  • 1979, IBM created BITNET,  a store and forward network

  • 1980, addition of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) to the Internet Protocol

  • 1981, NSF created 56 Kpbs backbone CSNET with radio and satellite connection for institutions not connected to ARPANET

  • 1983, Every machine on ARPANET must use TCP/IP replacing NCP and Domain Name System created by University of Wisconsin

  • 1984-5, upgrade to CSNET created a new NSFNET of T1 speed, 1.544 Mbps; Domain Name service (DNS) introduced

  • 1987, BITNET and CSNET merged to form corporation for research and education networking (CERN)

  • 1988, CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) formed by DARPA in response to the needs exhibited during the Morris worm incident. The worm is the only advisory issued this year

  • 1990, Merit, IBM and MCI formed a not-for-profit corporation, Advanced Network & Services, which created the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps line. NSF quickly adopted and implemented the new network by the end of 1991

  • 1990, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN implemented a hypertext system for the international high-energy physics community; Archie (information search and retrieval) released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill

  • 1991, NSF created National Research and Education Network (NREN) dedicated to high-speed networking research free of commercial data traffic of Internet; World-Wide Web released by CERN, TimBreners-Lee developer; Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), invented by Brewster Kahle, released by Thinking Machines Corporation; Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the Univ of Minnesota;

  • 1992, Internet Society chartered, NSFNET upgraded to T3

  • 1993, InterNIC created by NSF to provide Internet directory and database, registration and information services; Marc Andreessen, NCSA and U. Ill.nois, developed an interface to WWW, Mosaic for X; Worms of a new kind find their way around the Net - WWW Worms (W4), joined by Spiders, Wanderers, Crawlers, and Snakes ...   

  • 1994, Asynchronous Transmission Mode (ATM, 145 Mbps) installed on NSFNET

  • 1995, NSF announced access to NSFNET backbone via 4 access providers; $50 domain fee imposed; The new NSFNET establishes the very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) linking super-computing centers: NCAR, NCSA, SDSC, CTC, PSC

  • 1995, Packet Switching to voice over Internet (Leonard Kleinrock, MIT: "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" 5-31-1961, First paper on packet-switching (PS) theory; Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) awarded Packet Switch contract to build Interface Message Processors (IMPs), 1968)

  • 1996, Various ISPs suffer extended service outages, bringing into question whether they will be able to handle the growing number of users. AOL (19 hours), Netcom (13 hours), AT&T WorldNet (28 hours - email only); MCI upgrades Internet backbone adding ~13,000 ports, bringing the effective speed from 155Mbps to 622Mbps

  • 1998, US Department of Commerce (DoC) releases the Green Paper outlining its plan to privatize DNS on 30 January. This is followed up by a White Paper on June 5

  • 1999, vBNS sets up an OC48 2488Mbps link between CalREN South and North using Juniper M40 routers; IBM becomes the first Corporate partner to be approved for Internet2 access; MCI/Worldcom, the vBNS provider for NSF, begins upgrading the US backbone to 2.5GBps; Abilene, the Internet2 network, reaches across the Atlantic and connects to NORDUnet and SURFnet; MCI/Worldcom launches vBNS+, a commercialized version of vBNS targeted at smaller educational and research institutions

  • 2000, Internet2 backbone network deploys IPv6 (16 May); A testbed allowing the registration of domain names in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean begins operation on 9 November. This testbed, created by VeriSign without IETF authorization, only allows the second-level domain to be non-English, still forcing use of .com, .net, .org. The Chinese government blocks internal registrations, stating that registrations in Chinese are its sovereignty right

  • 2001, First uncompressed real-time gigabit HDTV transmission across a wide-area IP network takes place on Internet2 (12 Nov).

Author's experience with Internet: Not associated with high energy physics research nor networking research, the author was not involved in the main stream of Internet research during his first 17 years at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. However, the author was privileged to be offered a challenge by the Singapore government, National Computer Board, to build a research institute, from 1985-1988. The author wanted to develop a high caliber research center with a mission to lead Singapore into the forefront of information technology. The author then developed an architecture and a blue print of a system, called intelligent public information system, which was implemented to a working prototype. The system consisted of a number of key concepts resembling hypertexted windows, web pages and remote access of today's Internet. The IPIS was implemented with IBM PCs and IBM Unix servers (former versions of RS6000 before AIX servers). The demonstration and results of IPIS were reported in Asian regional conferences and featured in Singapore Business Yearbook, SB Yearbook, pp80-86, 1988,  where the IPIS and its web-like tourism information system was graphically illustrated with actual applications. Upon returning to IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, the author was chartered to lead research into application software till 1994. Prompted by his frustration of being unable to conduct the world first virtual conference, he proposed, on the Internet at IBM, he took retirement leave to Polytechnic University where he established a research institute (PRIDE) devoted to Internet innovations and applications. The first Internet virtual conference with a fixed time and schedule (GISS) was conducted on the Internet and sponsored by PRIDE since 1995. Dr. Vinton Cerf was invited and featured as the 1996 GISS Keynote Speaker [17] (virtual speaker responded conference audiences by e-mail) The author also led the development of the comprehensive Internet distanceless learning system (icare4learning.com), the first web camera for traffic and parking lot monitoring, the intelligent medical search engine (mwsearch.com) and the Internet telephony applications (codecphone.com). Today, the author is leading the start-up company IPO2U.COM where VoIP technology is incorporated in a new product and service concept for e-commerce.

      Acknowledgement and References: many web sources including http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline were consulted in compiling the above list for the purpose of this paper