How did the Internet start?

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Clayton replied on Thu, Mar 25 2010 1:32 PM

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Non Scholae Sed Vitae:

I've heard conflicting stories and I was wondering if I could get your perspective.

ARPANet was a computer network that connected US defense installations and also some universities. It was not the only network in existence at that time. In fact, the only thing that made ARPANet unique was its "meta-network" nature, that is, its connecting of integrated networks together over very long distances. Even the packet system in the early ARPANet protocols was not unique or unprecedented. "Packet" network models had been described long before ARPANet came along.

The computer is the magic that makes the internet so different from any other communication medium. We had telephone networks before computer networks and telegraph networks before that and courier networks before that. But what makes the Internet categorically unique from all prior communications technologies is the capacity for the computers to intelligently process the data stream according to pre-programmed instructions. Yes, packet routers perform amazing things these days, routing information all over the globe but they are not much more than mechanized telephone operators of the days of yore who patched your call through with a patch cable.

The focus on the transport protocols or the packetization or the routing is all misplaced. These systems are rather mundane and did not require that much imagination to invent. The history of the early internet was primarily an ad hoc, evolutionary process of successive solutions of the problem at hand. What makes the worldwide web so remarkable is not its mechanism (the internet). It is the content, the user-generated information, along with the ingenuity of hundreds of millions of people in developing new ways to automate the tasks of information retrieval, transport, visualization and so on. There is nothing very remarkable about the ability to connect my computer to Auburn, Alabama (or wherever the mises.org servers are located). That could be done long before ARPANet, it was just a matter of dialing the right phone number to access the modem you wanted to connect to. What is remarkable is the information which is available on mises.org both from the efforts of the LvMI in making Austrian texts available, many for free, its articles and journals and user-generated content (such as this forum). DARPA has nothing to do with any of that.

DARPA cannot even be credited with foreseeing the Internet. DARPA created ARPANet in part to maintain communications between defense installations in the event of nuclear war (though ARPANet was not the only such system, check out GWEN, for example). DARPA had no interest in facilitating "e-commerce", e-mail or chat sessions between US military personnel. Because of the advantages of centralized computing over desktop computing at the time ARPANet was growing, most experts at the time believed that computing would remain a specialized activity only used by researchers, academics and large commercial interests, who would most likely rent compute time from dedicated remote compute service providers. The commoditization of silicon integrated circuits changed all that.

The explosion of the desktop PC and its millions of private users, more than any technical issues related to how to format or route packets over an "inter-network", is what made the Web the invaluable part of everyday life that it has become.

If you spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on research projects, inevitably, some of the developments will be used as components in valuable consumer products. It's impossible to spend that much money and not produce something of some redeeming value. That ARPANet was retooled and re-used by the public to suit its purposes, ultimately becoming the Web, is not any sort of credit to the government. It's just an unavoidable result of spending billions and billions of taxpayers dollars on all sorts of speculative projects. The real question is whether those billions of dollars would have been better spent elsewhere. The answer is certainly yes. Inter-networks existed, outside of ARPANet, and those inter-networks would have become the Web (in some ways, they did too, as the modern Web is cobbled together from many sources). The horn-blowing of DARPA regarding ARPANet is just bureaucratic back-patting. They were in some way involved with the Internet, so they have to take all the credit, as if it were DARPA who developed the Internet. Al Gore's famous quote is just a reflection of this mindset of the government taking credit for the work of everyone in order to blow its own horn and justify continued funding of its hemorrhaging budget with extortionate taxes.

Clayton -