Internet

Information Superhighway

The revolutionary technology of the Internet and the World Wide Web created a whole new digital culture in America during the 1990s. The idea of an "Information Superhighway" that could link anyone in the world through nearly instantaneous data transmission became a reality, and terms such as "cyberspace" and "the Net" became part of everyday speech. The introduction of the Internet into mainstream American society changed the ways that business and commerce was conducted, information exchanged, and social interaction carried out.

ARPANET

Joseph C. R. Licklider, a psychologist at M.I.T., first envisioned the idea of an Internet, or an inter-connected computer network. In August of 1962 he wrote a series of memos discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which anyone with a computer terminal could quickly access data and programs from another computer. In 1962 Licklider became the first head of the computer research program at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a bureau of the Department of Defense. Created in 1958 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, ARPA was the first U.S. response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik (4 October 1957). The mission of ARPA was to ensure that the United States maintained a lead in applying state-of-the-art technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprises from an enemy. In 1969 scientists at ARPA created the first-ever computer network, known as the ARPANET. It was originally intended to promote access to big, time-sharing supercomputers among U.S. researchers through a cooperative network. From these humble origins, it grew into the worldwide phenomenon known as the Internet.

Packet Switching

One of the key innovations that made the Internet possible was packet switching. A telephone used "circuit switching," by which a circuit was opened between two machines, forming a connection that allowed information to be passed back and forth. Each circuit was "dedicated," meaning only those machines it connected could exchange information. Circuit switching was problematic, however, because if for any reason the connection was broken, the entire communication was lost. In the 1960s, fearing a loss of communication in the event of Soviet attack, the U.S. military began to experiment with ways around circuit switching. To ensure national communication even without telephones, the United States needed an indestructible communications network. Moreover, this network needed to have no central control station that would be an obvious target for enemy bombs. Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation, the foremost Cold War think tank, proposed a system of decentralized packet switching. Using packet switching, a message could get to its final destination even if part of the network was destroyed. The message to be sent was divided into "packets" and launched into the network. Each packet was like a postcard carrying some part of the message, with a "to" and "from" address, or a header, indicating where it wanted to go. Unlike a telephone system, there was no dedicated circuit opened from point A to point B; rather, the packets found their way-through the network along any paths that were open to them, moving from node to node along the network. A node was like a post office that sent the postcards along toward the recipient. Each node kept copies of the packets and continued to send them out until the packets successfully reached the next node. When all of the packets reached the final destination, they were reassembled and the complete message was delivered to the recipient. Packet switching worked better than circuit switching because as long as some part of the network was still functioning, the message could successfully get through.

IMPs

To build the first ARPANET, which would link four heterogeneous mainframe computers, ARPA scientists found that the easiest way to connect the mainframes was to build identical special purpose minicomputers to form a network and to tie each mainframe to one of them. This way, the mainframe computers did not have to change to be able to communicate with each other. These mini-computers were called Interface Message Processors (IMPs). The first ARPANET used four identical IMPs, utilizing packet switching technology, to link four different mainframe computers in four different locations: a Sigma 7 at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), an SDS 940 at Stanford Research Institute, an IBM 360/75 at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), and a PDP-10 at the University of Utah. Since the first networks had to use telephones, and thus circuit switching, to communicate, special hardware and software was built so that if the telephone circuits failed, the IMPs, using packet switching, could try to retransmit the message. On 1 September 1969 the first IMP was plugged into the UCLA mainframe. By December 1969 all four computers were interconnected and the first network was successful By April 1971 the ARPANET had eighteen mainframe computers hooked into its network. In October 1972 ARPA demonstrated its computer network in Washington, D.C., at the International Computer Communications Conference. This event was the first international conference on computers and communication sponsored by ARPA. At the time, ARPA had fewer than twenty-five sites on-line. After the conference the development of computer networks took off, and networks began to multiply throughout the Western world. In 1974 Bolt, Baranek and Newman (BBN), the company that built the first IMPs, opened Telnet, the first commercial version of the ARPANET.

E-mail

At first, the ARPANET could only be used to transfer data files from computer to computer. In 1971 Raymond S. Tomlinson at BBN wrote the first "killer app": e-mail. He developed the code for e-mail on his own time, for fun. Tomlinson later said, "It seemed like a neat idea." He was the first person to use the now-ubiquitous @-sign. In 1972 he modified his electronic-mail program for use on the ARPANET, where it became a quick hit with other users. E-mail quickly became the most popular application on the ARPANET, with people using it to collaborate on research projects and discuss various topics.

TCP/IP

With the proliferation of networks, a new problem emerged. Each individual Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN) essentially spoke its own language. There was as yet no communal networking language that could allow separate networks to communicate with each other. In 1973 Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf and Robert E. Kahn teamed up to develop TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which was a set of rules, or protocols, that would allow different networks to pass their messages back and forth. The computer used to connect the networks that would know this protocol was called the gateway or router. The gateway interconnected the networks to each other, and could encapsulate packets coming from host computers and send them out to other networks. No information was retained by the gateways about the individual flow of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple. Even though networks were connected, there was no central agency that controlled the flow of information. In 1983 TCP/IP was adopted as the universal standard for networks, a milestone in the development of the Internet. It made possible a common, interconnected network. For the first time, the loose collection of networks that made up the ARPANET was seen as an "internet," and the Internet that would transform business, entertainment, and education in the 1990s was born.

Open Architecture

The Internet was built with an open-architecture, meaning that there were no set rules as to what it could and could not be used for. The ideas of inclusion and generality of purpose were central to the growth of the Internet. Since it was not controlled by one central source, it could be adapted to a variety of ideas and applications. In an open-architecture network, the individual networks that connected to the Internet could be separately designed and developed. Each could have its own unique interface that it offered to users and/or other providers. Thus, each network could be designed in accordance with the specific environment and user requirements of that network. The rate of evolution of the Internet was high because so many people from different areas were contributing to it, adding applications and designs that were not even thought of when the Internet was first created. There was no board of directors that dictated how the Internet could be used, or what information could be passed along it. The Internet belonged to everyone and no one.

Growth of the Internet

The mid 1980s marked a boom in the personal computer and super-minicomputer industries. The combination of inexpensive desktop machines and powerful, network-ready servers allowed many companies to join the Internet for the first time. Corporations began to use the Internet to communicate with each other and with their customers. Throughout the 1980s, more and more small networks were linked to the Internet, including those of the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and many foreign, educational, and commercial networks. The nodes in the growing Internet were divided up into Internet "domains," known as "mil," "org," "com," "gov," "edu," and "net." "Gov," "mil," and "edu" denoted government, military, and educational institutions, which were the pioneers of the Internet. "Com" stood for commercial institutions that were soon joining in, along with nonprofit "orgs," while "net" computers served as gateways between networks.

The ARPANET was originally developed as a tool for defense research and was restricted to certain universities and think tanks engaged in government projects. For this reason, private networks such as Prodigy, CompuServe, and what became America Online (AOL) began to spring up so that individuals could join in. In 1990 the ARPANET was decommissioned, leaving the vast network-of-networks called the Internet. In 1991 the National Science Foundation lifted a restriction on commercial traffic on its NSFNET, the backbone of the Internet, opening it to commercial use. At that time, the number of Internet hosts exceeded three hundred thousand.

World Wide Web

In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer, invented The World Wide Web while working at CERN (Conseil European pour la Recherché Nucleaire), the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland. It was based on a program he wrote for his own use in 1980 called "Enquire," and was a means for storing information using random associations that allowed him to move from one document to another through keyword links. In 1989 he proposed a global hypertext project, which he would call the World Wide Web. Building on his earlier "Enquire" software, he developed a way to more easily follow threads of knowledge within the information on the Internet by programming computers to store information in random associations. He wrote the HyperText Mark-Up Language (HTML), an easy-to-learn coding language that allowed others to create links in their documents and write their own web pages to connect into the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee also created an addressing system that gave each web page a unique location, or universal resource locator (URL), and a set of rules that allowed these documents to be linked together across the Internet. He called that set of rules HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). With this addressing system nearly any Internet document, be it text, picture, sound, or video, could be retrieved and viewed on the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee also created the first World Wide Web browser, a text-based system that was able to read communications written in HTTP. The World Wide Web was released on the Internet in 1991. In the tradition of open-architecture, the World Wide Web allowed for maximum openness and flexibility. Web documents used a similar language to connect to each other, but there were no rules as to the content of these documents, and different types of browsers could be created to access them. While the World Wide Web would change the face of the Internet, it took another, easier-to-use Web browser to make it easily accessible to mainstream America.

Mosaic Browser and Netscape Navigator

Another development rocketed the Internet to nearly instantaneous acceptance by people worldwide. A new browser software for the World Wide Web was developed in 1993 by Marc Andreessen, a twenty-two-year-old student at the University of Illinois, along with a group of student programmers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) located on the campus. Andreessen called it the Mosaic browser. While the first web browser developed by Berners-Lee was text-based, Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, using a "point and click" interface. It encouraged users to load their own documents onto the net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext "links" to other documents. Mosaic incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Internet. It turned the Internet into a graphically rich world, in which users could view text, use scroll bars, and move around the Web with the click of a mouse. In 1992 there were only fifty web pages on the Internet. In 1993, after Mosaic was released, the World Wide Web grew by 341,000 percent. Web browsers went commercial the next year when Andreessen cofounded Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape released Netscape Navigator, its improved graphical browser in December 1994, and a communications revolution was on the way. That same year, Pizza Hut began accepting orders over the Internet. In 1995 Sun Microsystems released Java, an Internet programming language that radically altered the way that information could be retrieved, displayed, and used over the Internet. By the late 1990s, the Internet had become simpler to use, able to perform more complex tasks, and capable of carrying more types of information. In 1996 approximately forty million people in almost 150 countries were connected to the Internet. By 1999 there were more than eleven million domain names registered on the Web, with more than seventy million websites. In thirty years the Internet grew from a Cold War concept for communicating through the remains of a postnuclear society to an Information Superhighway that ushered in a social and economic revolution.

Sources:

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) home page, Internet website.

Barry M. Leiner, Vernon G. Cerf, and others, "A Brief History of the Internet," revised edition, Internet Society, 14 April 2000, Internet website.

"PBS Life on the Internet: Net Timeline," PBS Online, Internet website.

Ben Segal, A Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN, CERN—European Organization for Nuclear Research (Conseil European pour la Recherché Nucleaire), April 1995, Internet website.

Robert H'obbes' Zakon, "Hobbes' Internet Timeline v5.0," Internet Society, Internet website.

Internet Domain Names

An Internet domain name is a string of typographic characters used to describe the location of a specific location online. Formally known as the Uniform Resource Locator or URL, it is often considered to be the address of a certain Web site. Obtaining an Internet domain name is a vital step for small businesses hoping to establish a presence on the Internet. "To be a major league team in the Internet game, your business will want a domain name of its own," Vince Emery wrote in How to Grow Your Business on the Internet. "These valuable intellectual assets … make the difference in your image between Internet pro and fumbling amateur. Your domain name is more than your address. It tells the world who you are and what you do.

A typical domain name consists of several parts. As an example, consider an auto parts business with the domain www.spareparts.com. The letters "www." before the domain name mean that what follows describes the location of a site on the World Wide Web. The last two or three letters of a domain name or URL are known as its top-level domain. The top-level domain for the sample used earlier, www.spareparts.com is .com.Some of the most common top-level domains include .com, which usually indicates a business or commercial site; .org, which generally describes a nonprofit, charity, or cultural organization site; .gov, which indicates a governmental site; and .net, which is most often used by network-related businesses. Other common top-level domains are country codes, like .us for United States and .au for Australia, etc. Small businesses can put as many subdomains as needed in front of their domain names. For example, the customer service department of the aforementioned auto parts business might be designated as www.service.spareparts.com.

Internet domain names are fairly easy and inexpensive to obtain. The process of registering a domain name involves searching to see if the desired name is already taken, filling out a form online, and paying a fee of around $35 for the first year. Maintaining the domain name will require a small annual fee. But small businesses may find it exceedingly difficult to secure the exact domain name they want. As Jacqueline Emigh noted in Computerworld, the supply of available domain names is dwindling rapidly, particularly in the popular .com top-level domain. In some cases, the best domain names are already being used by other individuals or firms. Some larger businesses will register several different domain names in case they might be needed in the future, or in order to protect themselves against competing sites. But in other cases, the best domain names are held by cybersquatters or cyberpirates. These individuals register a number of domain names that are likely to be coveted by businesses in hopes of selling them in the future for a significant profit. This practice has developed into a sort of low level marketplace in which there are Web sites dedicated to trading—purchasing and selling—of registered domain names. One such Wed based trading business is located online at www.sedo.com.

CHOOSING AND REGISTERING A DOMAIN NAME

For small businesses hoping to establish a presence on the World Wide Web, choosing an Internet domain name is nearly as important as choosing a company name. The name must fit the firm's overall marketing strategy and convey a positive message to potential customers. In addition to registering a domain name for the company's Web site, small business owners might also consider registering the names of major products, important markets, or well-known slogans. As Bill Roberts explained in Electronic Business, small business owners must make sure that the domain names they choose are not overly long and avoid unconventional spellings that may be difficult for people to remember. Since doing business on the Internet immediately exposes companies to international markets, it is also important to be careful of trademark infringement issues and cultural problems in other languages.

There are a number of ways to handle the registration of an Internet domain name. In most cases, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) can register a small business's domain name and maintain the company's Web site on its server. The ISP can conduct an online search to make sure that the domain name does not duplicate any existing name or infringe on the trademark of any other business. Although registering through an ISP can simplify the process for small businesses, it is important for the business to secure ownership of the domain name. Otherwise, it may be difficult to keep the domain name if the company decides to change ISPs.

Small business owners can also register a domain name through Network Solutions Inc. (NSI), a private company which began registering names in 1993 through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. government. The process involves conducting a free online search, filling out a form on the NSI Web site (networksolutions.com), and paying a fee of approximately $35 for a single year of domain name ownership. Finally, small businesses can register domain names through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization that has been taking over increased responsibility for the registration process (details are available online at www.icann.org).

With authority from the U.S. government, ICANN has begun addressing the problems of Internet site registration, including the diminishing supply of domain names and the resolution of disputes over names. As Walter Eidson outlined in the Washington Business Journal, ICANN implemented a new dispute resolution policy on January 1, 2000, to settle questions over ownership and use of popular domain names. In order to dispute another party's use of a domain name, a small business must prove that the name is identical or confusingly similar to a previously registered trademark and that the other party has no legitimate business interest in it. Businesses are unlikely to prevail in such disputes if the other party had registered the name in good faith and was using it for legitimate purposes. But businesses do have recourse in cases where the other party is using the name in bad faith—for example, holding it for the purpose of selling it, blocking the legitimate owner from using it, or attracting customers through deception.

see also Search Engine; Web Page Design

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dowling, Paul J., Jr., et al. Web Advertising and Marketing. Prima, 1996.

Eidson, Walter. "How to Protect, Defend an Internet Domain Name." Washington Business Journal. 14 January 2000.

Emery, Vince. How to Grow Your Business on the Internet. Third Edition. Coriolis Group, 1997.

Emigh, Jacqueline. "Domain Naming." Computerworld. 27 September 1999.

Porter, Monica. "Addressing an Investment Issue—Money Maverick Domain Names." The Financial Times. 11 March 2006.

Roberts, Bill. "The Name Game." Electronic Business. November 1999.

"The Value of a Domain Name." Web Marketing Today Free Weekly. 15 March 2006.

                              Hillstrom, Northern Lights

                               updated by Magee, ECDI