Summary
Highlights
Vint Cerf explains that the original project, ARPANET, was designed to enable resource sharing among a dozen universities working on behalf of the defense department in computer science and AI. This experimental network allowed universities to share computing resources and software, fostering collaboration and building on each other's work more quickly, all funded by the government to prevent information hoarding.
The success of ARPANET led to the recognition that computers could be useful in command and control, requiring mobile and diverse communication methods beyond dedicated telephone circuits, including radio and satellite. This necessitated a solution to connect multiple packet-switched networks using different technologies, giving rise to the 'internet' problem of interconnection, which was solved by 1974 with a non-proprietary approach.
The Internet officially launched in 1983 and became commercial in 1988-1989. This commercialization created a market for products using these protocols, leading to companies like Cisco Systems and Juniper manufacturing equipment. This made the Internet accessible to educational communities, the military, and eventually private sector enterprises and academic institutions worldwide, rapidly evolving into a global commercial enterprise.
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee released the World Wide Web, which initially went unnoticed. However, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina's development of the Mosaic graphical browser made the internet come alive, transforming it into a visually rich platform with images, video, and audio, akin to a magazine. This led to an explosion of information, subsequently necessitating the development of search engines like AltaVista, Yahoo, and Google to navigate the vast amount of data.
Risk-taking and acceptance of failure were crucial. Government involvement, particularly through persistent funding over many years (ARPANET from 1968-1990, the Internet project from 1973 onwards), was vital. This sustained support for high-risk research, targeting the best individuals, and allowing for commercialization, enabled the Internet's development, with the US government and others deserving significant credit.
The permission for the commercial sector to connect to the government-sponsored backbone in 1988 was a turning point for Internet commercialization. The architecture was designed for extraordinary flexibility, allowing new telecommunications technologies to be integrated seamlessly, as the internet packets do not know how they are being carried across various networks. This design principle ensures the system accommodates future unknown technologies.
The Internet's design also ensures that packets don't know what they're carrying, meaning new applications can be developed without requiring changes to the network itself. This concept of 'permissionless innovation' — where anyone can build and deploy new applications without seeking prior approval — has led to countless new developments. Cerf suggests that harnessing this collaborative, open-source approach, similar to how the World Wide Web allowed users to view and modify source code, could further foster innovation in new areas like 3D printing and create new job opportunities.