The Internet At 35

Anonymous writes "CNN has a story on the 35th anniversary of the Internet, overviewing its past and the future. According to the article the history began on 'September 2, 1969, as bits of meaningless test data flowed silently between the two computers.' So, happy birthday, the Internet!"

Comments

The ARPAnet, not quite the Internet

[isdnip]

Well, let's not let the title get too carried away on accuracy, even disregarding its subtraction error. In 1969, the prototype ARPAnet started up. It used NCP (TCP/IP came later). It didn't become the "Internet" until there were multiple interconnected networks, and that was not until the early 1980s, after the TCP/IP transition (which was completed in 1983). There were multiple networks once the more production-oriented MILNET split off of the more research-y ARPAnet. And after that came CSnet and all sorts of others.

But yes, it was in many ways better in the early days (pre-1993), because there was no spam, or for that matter any other advertising. Although Google and the like do sort of make up for it.

Re:The ARPAnet, not quite the Internet

[Kiryat Malachi]

Enjoy your memories.

All the fun of BBS textfiles without the modem.

Re:What progress

[Inthewire]

Air conditioning.
Polio vaccine.
Traffic lights.
Frozen food.
Television.
Large-scale farming.
Credit cards.
Flouride.

There have been dozens if not hundreds of things invented in the past 100 years that have changed lifestyles more than the internet.

ipv6 vs ipv4 inaccuracy in CNN article

[stanwirth]

Change doesn't come easily, however. For instance, the IPv6 numbering system was deemed an Internet standard about five years ago, but the vast majority of software and hardware today still runs on the older IPv4, which is rapidly running out of room.

Ipv4 running out of room is a bit of a myth -- there's still plenty of companies and uninversities with huge blocks of ipv4 address space that they have for historical reasons.

Most ipv4 stacks run on top of an ipv6 stack now and have for several years. I don't see what hardware has to do with it, unless they mean those old routers on the backbone. Most peoples' desktop's and server's NICs can already handle ipv6, and there's nothing stopping them from writing and using ipv6-based applications (client and server). Gettiing ipv6 packets through an ipv4-only backbone segment is just a matter of setting up a tunnel.

PS I think they meant internet turns 23 -- in hex

Re:ipv6 vs ipv4 inaccuracy in CNN article

[suwain_2]

Ipv4 running out of room is a bit of a myth -- there's still plenty of companies and uninversities with huge blocks of ipv4 address space that they have for historical reasons.

Rather than debunk the myth, you've proved it.

The whole reason we're "running out of room" is that "old" companies have massive netblocks they're not even beginning to use.

This is like saying, "There's still plenty of land left in the city. Big companies bought it all up to hold onto." There's plenty of unused IPs out there. The problem is that they'll probably never be assigned.

I once wrote a script to do a whois on every Class A, and lump them into a text file. I was surprised to find that the United States Government owns something like 30 Class A's.

It's not a lack of unused IPs. It's a lack of allocatable IPs.

Re:ipv6 vs ipv4 inaccuracy in CNN article

[DrDebug]

Actually, one of the lesser known goals of IPv6 is to DECREASE the size of the routing tables. This happens because of better allocation of IP routes.

Re:And in this time of Celebration let us not forg

[Anonymous Coward]

Al Gore did not create the internet! He coined the phrase "Information Highway", in a speach about the World Wide Web that was just starting to become available to public users.

Already 35?

[Pan T. Hose]

Wow, is it already 35? I feel so old... I remember when back in the early 1970s I said to one of my friends that I don't know when, I don't know how, but I am sure that eventually one day someone will somehow use this new technology for pornography... In my sickest dreams I haven't imagined something on the scale of images.google.com, though. That having been said, happy birthday to Internet, the most important achievment of humanity since the printing press. It all began on "September 2, 1969, as bits of meaningless test data flowed silently between the two computers." Today, after only 35 years, the unbelievably obscene amount of meaningless data silently flowing between billions of computers in every second, makes me wonder: can the net amount of entropy of the universe be decreased? Will the Internet help us find any meaningful answer? In any case, I am sure that the Internet is something which our grandchildren and their grandchildren will learn at school about. September 2 is a very important day. There is even an article on Wikipedia about this very day. I believe every person who has ever published anything on the Internet should be proud, because this is something all of us has created, even if none of use has envisioned. Truly remarkable achievment. Happy birthday!

Re:language

[corb00]

what was the first word ?
--- here is the answer from the author:
http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/first_words.html

Re:Who would have guessed

[corb00]

I'm sorry, but have to agree with previous post.
Von Braun, father of APOLLO, predicted the following scenarios:

1) all funds spent on accomplishing a manned landing on moon
-> no further missions possible
OR
2) land unmanned and preserve budget for a better and gradual research

we all know what happened ..

Internet 35 Forum @ UCLA

[Anonymous Coward]

UCLA will host a forum for the 35th Anniversary of Internet on October 29th. http://www.internetanniversary.com

Re:editors?

[WWWWolf]

What did it use before that?

Can't remember the exact details, but there were special computers designed to handle the networking, called Interface Message Processors (IMPs). So you had the actual ARPAnet host, IMP machine, more than some dedicated cabling between them, another IMP, and another host.

TCP/IP, as far as I remember, was more like formal spec of what was going on between IMPs, and hosts and IMPs - adapted so that the actual networking hardware didn't matter that much.

technically, just the ArpaNet is 35

[peter303]

Until the mid-80s there were several national networks with various qualities of interconnectability-ArpaNet, MilNet, NSFNet, BitNet, etc. The "InterNet" agreed on standardized protocols and funded a trans-continental optical fiber backbone. AL Gore (really) is repsonsible for that legislation.