The Internet: No Longer a Teenager

by Paul McGoldrick

Tim Berners-Lee, knighted in 2004, persuaded his boss at CERN to load his team’s basic client-server protocol on an internal server in December 1990. The reality of the Internet was born at that moment, although it took another two years before the first server outside Europe was to join the nascent network – that being at Stanford in December 1992.

It should not have been a surprise, to anyone who had been looking over the progression of events that led up to that birth. Berners Lee himself wrote a program that was divulged ten years earlier, in 1980, that could link computer nodes, and TCP (the transport control protocol) was invented even earlier by Cerf and Kahn in 1974 – which itself led to the definition of the IP a few years later. The reality of the Internet in relation to ARPANET – which initially consisted of four IMPs (interface message processors – what we would now call routers) at UCLA, UCSB, Stanford, and the University of Utah – is often misunderstood. Although ARPANET demonstrated communications using packet switching (unlike the dedicated line switching of a telephone service) the actual practicality of packet switching was proven by the NPL (National Physical Laboratory) in the UK in 1968, a year before ARPANET was officially formed. ARPANET was never going to be a universal solution for international communications, however, and the reality of the Internet was delayed until simplicity could reign.

The real spigot to turning on traffic was the release by CERN of web protocol, free of charge, in 1993, right after the announcement of the Mosaic browser by the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

(Mosaic was written by Marc Andressen and Eric Bina, later of Netscape fame, and the browser was licensed on to Spyglass, a spin-off from the university. That license did not include the source code, however, and separate code to that of Netscape Navigator had to be developed. When Microsoft finally understood the value of web browsers they tried to license Navigator, and failed to do so. Instead the company licensed Mosaic from Spyglass and entered into one of those revenue sharing agreements that seem more popular in the entertainment industry. Internet Explorer, as it became, was to be a royalty revenue stream for Spyglass but Microsoft then bundled it with Windows instead of just being an add-on as it was with Windows 95. The result was no separate IE revenue and, therefore, no royalties for Spyglass. Microsoft eventually settled threats from Spyglass for a paltry $8 million.)

After twenty years, where is the Internet now? It has managed, it seems, to have gone through its teenage years without the angst, blame, hyperbole, and smart-assed behavior that we associate with human teens. And, although there are many negatives associated with what the Internet delivers us, unwanted to most, we would all be much, much poorer without it.

Just look at some numbers: Google now crawls through one trillion pages; of those about 15 billion pages are believed to be indexed; there are estimated to be over 800 million Internet users in Asia (compare with ‘only’ 500 million in Europe and under 300 million in North America); there are about 120 million Internet domains; IP addresses number well over 4 billion out of the potential 4.3 billion allowed by the 4 bytes of IPv4.

The latter consumption of IP addresses is due to some very inefficient allocation schemes as well as a considerable amount of homesteading (rushing to take over addresses that someone might want to pay you for in the future, or to protect alternate names for your company/operation). IPv6 will allow for 16 bytes for addresses (as well as other overhead improvements) but until IPv4 addresses run out – which is quite likely during 2011 – there seems to be no rush to move there. What happened to IPv5? That was rather stupidly allocated in the late 1970s to an experimental voice/video/data transmission protocol called ST (stream) that flopped for two decades until it became ST2.

So when you think how far we have gotten on the Internet, just remember that all that spam in your e-mail in box is also just a result of how big everything has become. With spammers’ abilities to send out hundreds of millions of messages at a single key push it is nice to know that only one in 17 million will be responded to by some other idiot. Rather you than me.