ARPANET

ARPANET, experimental computer network that was the forerunner of the Internet.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an arm of the U.S. Defense Department,
funded the development of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in
the late 1960s. Its initial purpose was to link computers at Pentagon-funded research
institutions over telephone lines.

At the height of the Cold War, military commanders were seeking a computer
communications system without a central core, with no headquarters or base of operations
that could be attacked and destroyed by enemies thus blacking out the entire network in one
fell swoop. ARPANET’s purpose was always more academic than military, but, as more
academic facilities connected to it, the network did take on the tentacle-like structure military
officials had envisioned. The Internet essentially retains that form, although on a much larger
scale.
Roots of a network
ARPANET was an end-product of a decade of computer-communications developments
spurred by military concerns that the Soviets might use their jet bombers to launch surprise
nuclear attacks against the United States. By the 1960s, a system called SAGE (Semi-
Automatic Ground Environment) had already been built and was using computers to track
incoming enemy aircraft and to coordinate military response. The system included 23
“direction centers,” each with a massive mainframe computer that could track 400 planes,
distinguishing friendly aircraft from enemy bombers. The system required six years and $61
billion to implement.

The system’s name hints at its importance, as author John Naughton points out. The system
was only “semi-automatic,” so human interaction was pivotal. For Joseph Carl Robnett
Licklider, who would became the first director of ARPA’s Information Processing
Techniques Office (IPTO), the SAGE network demonstrated above all else the enormous
power of interactive computing—or, as he referred to it in a seminal 1960 essay, of “man-
computer symbiosis.” In his essay, one of the most important in the history of computing,
Licklider posited the then-radical belief that a marriage of the human mind with the computer
would eventually result in better decision-making.

In 1962, Licklider joined ARPA. According to Naughton, his brief two-year stint at the
organization seeded everything that was to follow. His tenure signaled the demilitarization of
ARPA; it was Licklider who changed the name of his office from Command and Control
Research to IPTO. “Lick,” as he insisted on being called, brought to the project an emphasis
on interactive computing and the prevalent utopian conviction that humans teamed with
computers could create a better world.

Perhaps in part because of Cold War fears, during Licklider’s IPTO tenure, it is estimated
that 70 percent of all U.S. computer-science research was funded by ARPA. But many of
those involved said that the agency was far from being a restrictive
militaristic environment and that it gave them free rein to try out radical ideas. As a result,
ARPA was the birthplace not only of computer networks and the Internet but also
of computer graphics, parallel processing, computer flight simulation, and other key
achievements.

Get a Britannica
Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.Subscribe Now

Ivan Sutherland succeeded Licklider as IPTO director in 1964, and two years later Robert
Taylor became IPTO director. Taylor would become a key figure in ARPANET’s
development, partly because of his observational abilities. In the Pentagon’s IPTO office,
Taylor had access to three teletype terminals, each hooked up to one of three remote ARPA-
supported time-sharing mainframe computers—at Systems Development Corp. in Santa
Monica, at UC Berkeley’s Genie Project, and at MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System
project (later known as Multics).

In his room at the Pentagon, Taylor’s access to time-shared systems led him to a key social
observation. He could watch as computers at all three remote facilities came alive with
activity, connecting local users. Time-shared computers allowed people to exchange
messages and share files. Through the computers, people could learn about each other.
Interactive communities formed around the machines.

Taylor also decided that it made no sense to require three teletype machines just to
communicate with three incompatible computer systems. It would be much more efficient if
the three were merged into one, with a single computer-language protocol that could allow
any terminal to communicate with any other terminal. These insights led Taylor to propose
and secure funding for ARPANET.
A plan for the network was first made available publicly in October 1967, at an Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM) symposium in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. There, plans were
announced for building a computer network that would link 16 ARPA-sponsored universities
and research centers across the United States. In the summer of 1968, the Defense
Department put out a call for competitive bids to build the network, and in January 1969 Bolt,
Beranek, and Newman (BBN) of Cambridge, Massachusetts, won the $1 million contract.

According to Charles M. Herzfeld, the former director of ARPA, Taylor and his colleagues
wanted to see if they could link computers and researchers together. The project’s military
role was much less important. But at the time it was launched, Herzfeld noted, no one knew
whether it could be done, so the program, initially funded on $1 million diverted from
ballistic-missile defense, was risky.

Taylor became ARPA’s computer evangelist, picking up Licklider’s mantle and preaching
the gospel of distributed interactive computing. In 1968, Taylor and Licklider co-authored a
key essay, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” which was published in the popular
journal Science and Technology. It began with a thunderclap: “In a few years, men will be
able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” The article went
on to predict everything from global online communities to mood-sensing computer
interfaces. It was the first inkling the public ever had about the potential of networked digital
computing, and it attracted other researchers to the cause.
A packet of data

ARPANET arose from a desire to share information over great distances without the need for
dedicated phone connections between each computer on a network. As it turned out, fulfilling
this desire would require “packet switching.”

Paul Baran, a researcher at the RAND Corporation think tank, first introduced the idea. Baran
was instructed to come up with a plan for a computer communications network that could
survive nuclear attack and continue functioning. He came up with a process that he called
“hot-potato routing,” which later became known as packet switching.

“Packets” are small clusters of digital information broken up from larger messages for
expediency’s sake. To illustrate in more recent terms: an e-mail might be split into numerous
electronic packets of information and transmitted almost at random across the labyrinth of the
nation’s telephone lines. They do not all follow the same route and do not even need to travel
in proper sequential order. They are precisely reassembled by a modem at the receiver’s end,
because each packet contains an identifying “header,” revealing which part of the larger
message it represents, along with instructions for reconstituting the intended message. As a
further safeguard, packets contain mathematical verification schemes that insure data does
not get lost in transit. The network on which they travel, meanwhile, consists of computerized
switches that automatically forward packets on to their destination. Data packets make
computer communications more workable within existing telephone infrastructure by
allowing all those packets to flow following paths of least resistance, thereby preventing
logjams of digital data over direct, dedicated telephone lines.

Baran’s idea was ignored by the military. A 1964 paper outlining his innovation was
published, but it was classified and began to collect dust. Fortunately, one place it was
collecting dust was in the offices of ARPA, where it was eventually rediscovered. Baran’s
idea became the key concept that made ARPANET possible. Packet-switched communication
remains perhaps the most important legacy handed down to the Internet by ARPANET.
Rise and fall
In late 1969, a team of UCLA graduate students under the leadership of professor Leonard
Kleinrock sent the first packet-switched message between two computers. A member of
Kleinrock’s team, Charley Kline, had the distinction of being first to send it, but it was not a
rousing start. As Kline at UCLA tried logging into the Stanford Research Institute’s computer
for the first time, the system crashed just as he was typing the letter “G” in “LOGIN.”

The bugs were worked out, and further connections were made flawlessly, but the early
network had many limitations. At the time of Kline’s first message to Stanford, logging into a
remote computer was one of just three tasks possible on ARPANET; the other options were
printing to a remote printer and transferring files between computers. Nevertheless, the
interest generated by the nascent two-node network was intense. By the end of 1969,
academic institutions were scrambling to connect to ARPANET. The University of
California–Santa Barbara and the University of Utah linked up that year. By April 1971, there
were 15 nodes and 23 host terminals in the network. In addition to the four initial schools,
contractor BBN had joined, along with MIT, the RAND Corporation, and NASA, among
others. By January 1973, there were 35 connected nodes; by 1976, there were 63 connected
hosts.
During its first 10 years, ARPANET was a test bed for networking innovations. New
applications and protocols like Telnet, file transfer protocol (FTP), and network
control protocol (NCP) were constantly being devised, tested, and deployed on the network.
In 1971, BBN’s Ray Tomlinson wrote the first e-mail program, and the
ARPANET community took to it instantly. “Mailing lists,” which eventually became known
as “LISTSERVs,” followed e-mail almost immediately, creating virtual discussion groups.
One of the first e-mail discussion lists was SF-LOVERS, which was dedicated to science
fiction fans.

What ARPANET could not do was talk to any of the other computing networks that
inevitably sprang up in its wake. Its design required too much control and too much
standardization among machines and equipment on the network, according to Naughton. So
in the spring of 1973, Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn began considering ways of connecting
ARPANET with two other networks that had emerged, specifically SATNET (satellite
networking) and a Hawaii-based packet radio system called ALOHANET. One day, waiting
in a hotel lobby, Cerf dreamed up a new computer communications protocol, a gateway
between networks, which eventually became known as transmission-control protocol/Internet
protocol (TCP/IP). TCP/IP, which was first tested on ARPANET in 1977, was a way that one
network could hand off data packets to another, then another, and another. Eventually, when
the Internet consisted of a network of networks, Cerf’s innovation would prove invaluable. It
remains the basis of the modern Internet.

In 1975, ARPANET was transferred to the Defense Communications Agency. By that time, it
was no longer experimental, nor was it alone. Numerous new networks had emerged by the
late 1970s, including CSNET (Computer Science Research Network), CDnet (Canadian
Network), BITNET (Because It’s Time Network), and NSFNET (National Science
Foundation Network); the last of these would eventually replace ARPANET as the backbone
of the Internet, before it was itself superceded by commercial networks.

The term “Internet” was adopted in 1983, at about the same time that TCP/IP came into wide
use. In 1983, ARPANET was divided into two parts, MILNET, to be used by military and
defense agencies, and a civilian version of ARPANET. The word “Internet” was initially
coined as an easy way to refer to the combination of these two networks, to their
“internetworking.”
The end of ARPANET’s days arrived in mid-1982, when its communications protocol, NCP,
was turned off for a day, allowing only network sites that had switched to
Cerf’s TCP/IP language to communicate. On January 1, 1983, NCP was consigned to history,
and TCP/IP began its rise as the universal protocol. The final breakthrough for TCP/IP came
in 1985, when it was built into a version of the UNIX operating system. That eventually put it
in Sun Microsystems workstations and, Naughton writes, “into the heart of the operating
system which drove most of the computers on which the Internet would eventually run.” As
Cerf would observe, “The history of the Net is the history of protocols.”

As both free and commercial online services like Prodigy, FidoNet, Usenet, Gopher, and
many others rose, and as NSFNET became the Internet’s backbone, ARPANET’s importance
diminished. The system was finally shut down in 1989 and formally decommissioned in
1990, just two years before Tim Berners-Lee would change everything all over again with the
introduction of the World Wide Web.

World Wide Web (WWW)

All public websites or web pages that people may access on their local computers
and other devices through the internet are collectively known as the World Wide Web or
W3. Users can get further information by navigating to links interconnecting these pages
and documents. This data may be presented in text, picture, audio, or video formats on the
internet.
What is WWW?
WWW stands for World Wide Web and is commonly known as the Web. The
WWW was started by CERN in 1989. WWW is defined as the collection of different
websites around the world, containing different information shared via local servers(or
computers).
Web pages are linked together using hyperlinks which are HTML-formatted and, also
referred to as hypertext, these are the fundamental units of the Internet and are accessed
through Hyper Text Transfer Protocol(HTTP) . Such digital connections, or links, allow
users to easily access desired information by connecting relevant pieces of information. The
benefit of hypertext is it allows you to pick a word or phrase from the text and click on
other sites that have more information about it.
History of the WWW
It is a project created, by Tim Berner Lee in 1989, for researchers to work together
effectively at CERN. It is an organization, named the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ,
which was developed for further development of the web. This organization is directed by
Tim Berner’s Lee, aka the father of the web. CERN, where Tim Berners worked, is a
community of more than 1700 researchers from more than 100 country. These researchers
spend a few time on CERN, and rest of the time they work at their colleges and national
research facilities in their home country, so there was a requirement for solid
communication so that they can exchange data.
System Architecture
From the user’s point of view, the web consists of a vast, worldwide connection of
documents or web pages. Each page may contain links to other pages anywhere in the
world. The pages can be retrieved and viewed by using browsers of which internet explorer,
Netscape Navigator, Google Chrome, etc are the popular ones. The browser fetches the
page requested interprets the text and formatting commands on it, and displays the page,
properly formatted, on the screen.
The basic model of how the web works are shown in the figure below. Here the browser is
displaying a web page on the client machine. When the user clicks on a line of text that is
linked to a page on the abd.com server, the browser follows the hyperlink by sending a
message to the abd.com server asking it for the page.

Here the browser displays a web page on the client machine when the user clicks on a line
of text that is linked to a page on abd.com, the browser follows the hyperlink by sending a
message to the abd.com server asking for the page.
Working of WWW
A Web browser is used to access web pages. Web browsers can be defined as programs
which display text, data, pictures, animation and video on the Internet. Hyperlinked
resources on the World Wide Web can be accessed using software interfaces provided by
Web browsers. Initially, Web browsers were used only for surfing the Web but now they
have become more universal.
The below diagram indicates how the Web operates just like client-server architecture of
the internet. When users request web pages or other information, then the web browser of
your system request to the server for the information and then the web server provide
requested services to web browser back and finally the requested service is utilized by the
user who made the request.

Web browsers can be used for several tasks including conducting searches, mailing,
transferring files, and much more. Some of the commonly used browsers are Internet
Explorer, Opera Mini, and Google Chrome.
Features of WWW

 WWW is open source.

 It is a distributed system spread across various websites.
 It is a Hypertext Information System.
 It is Cross-Platform.
 Uses Web Browsers to provide a single interface for many services.
 Dynamic, Interactive and Evolving.

Components of the Web

There are 3 components of the web:

 Uniform Resource Locator (URL): serves as a system for resources on the web.
 Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP): specifies communication of browser and
server.
 Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML): defines the structure, organisation and
content of a web page.