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March 13 class notes

comptetencies

  • Had to have all the things in line first before we get to the internet - all the competencies. Everything had to come together

  • without insight, nothing works

  • we had to have imaginative leaps - the conceptualizations

    • metaphors and ideas

  • timesharing

    • batch processing
    • these machines are way faster than human attention span
    • enhance the usage of the machines
    • making an argument on why no other computer might be necessary, foreclosing other options

  • The humble modem

    • there needs to be a way of connecting the machine.
    • Modems adapted for SAGE system in 1953.

  • But which computer to use?

    • Another conceptual leap - connecting two computers (Moving data around)
    • packet switching
      • developed in US and UK at the same time.
      • Supervening social necessity - nuclear war

  • idea of failure of communications leading to nuclear war

  • Us political context

    • paul baran engineer at RAND, focuses on secure communications.
    • go / no go over radio via am radio. military needs more than this.
    • baran looks at the current module, investigates mathematics of networks
    • fully distributed communication networks

  • store and forward

    • message switching (think post office - integral message labeled with origin and desitnation
    • telegraph does this, manually then computered
    • baran's system is not hierarchical - least congestion is the route taken

  • not new

    • pulling ideas and concepts from one field and recasting it for another.
    • increminental jumps
    • problem was storing the message and woking out the routing.
    • broadcast analogy aint ideal.
    • baran proposes indivudal message routing.

    • faster the switches work, the fewer complete messages they have to hold onto

    • at&t already had this. miliatiry voice network built on top of the existing civilian network.

    • hardneded exchanges
    • centrally controlled like a traffic control system.
    • autonomy in switches and computerizing the routing of things is the big idea.

  • distributed adaptive messaging blockswitching!

    • packet switching.
    • everything is digital, the message can be anything but is represented as bits
    • air force promotes baran
    • baran and airforce withdraws from defense communications agency (they were phone people)

  • uk political context

    • first and second dead white men
    • concentrating on centralization
    • not wanting the "wrong sort" to be involved
    • task forces and projects set up
    • developing interactive / time sharing computer rather than batch processing
    • cost of long distance telecommunication
    • davis develops packet switching to maximize a scarce resource, for baran it was about secure comms
    • no one still knows the best way to interact with computers
    • davis unveils packet switching but the british military already knew that the US had developed it.
    • davis develops baran's work in a civilian context and he wants to bring down the cost - fairness and access
    • PoS transactions, database queiries, online gambling, remote data processing
    • Post office says NO
    • government interference meant that all work had to have economic spinoffs.
    • forcing computer companies to merge, killing off certain technologies and machines and components
    • driving women off to make way for upper class men.
    • britain is losing empire, they want control over the ruling class

  • meanwhile back in the us

    • ARPA is birthed because uh oh! sputnik! (1957)
    • space stuff needs to start. interagency politics.
    • gets its hands on some computers
    • licklider is responsible for directing computer projects at ARPA - shifts emphasis from pure calculations to things that we would recognize better today
    • solving the big problem - all these devices need to be able to communicate
    • in the case of armageddon, let's research anyway.
    • how humans interact with machines leading to interest in information theory
    • sage consoles had intergrated ashtrays
    • blue-sky paper on what if the machines talk to each other (look up for Memex "man computer symbiosis")
    • IPTO is dolling out money to research centers
    • arpa makes a study on cooperative network timesharing
    • a way of connecting IPNO centers together to conserve resources, arpanet project is made.
    • early computer science centers included UCLA, SRI, illinois supercomputing, MIT.
    • everyone wants a new machine, but if we can effectively wire all these places togehter then one can sit a terminal and access what they need from exisiting equipment.

  • networking mini computers. IMPs using packet switching.

    • the social dimension

  • IPTO discovers Baran's 1960 paper, is now involved.

  • first request for quotes for the ARPANET comes in august 1968

  • first four imps, $360,000 each.

  • programming to make them work $640,000

  • IPTO buys from honeywell instead.

  • imp is the ancestor to the router. how do we make this work? how do you actually make packet switching work?

  • what gets designed is a fusion between baran and davis' designs.

    • fewer hardened cold war survivability, more of the high speed transmission adaptive routing.
    • us is investing in pure research, uk sought immediate economic benefits
    • arpanet becomes more sophisticated than NPL despite being second out the gate

  • englebart, influenced by as we may think, demos the online system. "the mother of all demos"

    • hugely influenced subsequent developments

  • so much is going on!

    • by focusing on IMPs and how to automatically read the network for congestion, BBN IPTO & ARPA sidestep the local mainframe people

    • local mainframe people are not really on board

    • by 1968/9 things are happening fast.

    • extremely decentralized project
    • SRI comes up with the LOGIN command
    • many thoughts being produced by different groups

  • October 29 1969 = The Birth of the Internet

    • system crashed at the G of LOGIN

    • largely balding white guy story, but there's more to it. what else s going on here?

  • "Oh we got it working, how nice." video on last slide, never seen work as momentous, the idea of what else can we do with this