The 20th Anniversary of the Internet

Ross Finlayson writes "In a message posted to the IETF general mailing list, Bob Braden reminds us that, on January 1st, 2003, 20 years will have passed since "the most logical date of origin of the Internet [...] when the ARPANET officially switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP". And the rest is history..."

Al Gore is celebrating

[very (241808)]

as the inventor of the internet, Al Gore is celebrating by not running for President.

Re:Al Gore is celebrating

[by Anonymous Coward]

After all this time one would think that this ridiculous, ignorant, petty Republican FUD would have been laughed out of existence. For the nth time, read it and this time please try to understand:

http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nett im e-bold-0009/msg00161.html

Couple of significant quotes from Bob Kahn and Vint Cert:

"VC> Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant credit for
VC> his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet."

"...But as the two people
>who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the
>Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a
>Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to
>our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of
>time."

So yes, Al Gore did take a position of leadership in the creation of the Internet. He helped keep penny-pinching nearsighted legislators from killing it, because he was one of the few people in power who "got it". /rant

Happy new year everyone!

Re:Al Gore is celebrating

[markov_chain (202465)]

It's good to be suspicious of authority and all, but I would prefer a thousand Al Gores and nerds that suck up to him than one policitician paid off by the media cartel striving to destroy the freedoms that our general-purpose computing and networking technology provides us today.

--
Become a Vampire today! [ravenblack.net]

Re:some people value fact over humour

[kraksmoka (561333)]

i'm a dem sympathizer (i would sooner admit being a miami dolphins fan too), and have voted more dems than backwards racists party.

agnostic reply below

al did do alot on the legislative side. just like (this gets little recognition) Dan Quayle was the legislative sponsor (and fought hard for i'll add) the Patriot missile as a senator. he does deserve credit for seeing the future way back then . . . .

even tho i voted Gore in y2k, i still think the humor (and a better spelling too i might add) is really funny! didn't you people see SNL couple weeks back?? i'm sure even Al likes it at this point.

what are all you Lusers doing debating this old issue on /. on New Years EVE fur gosh sakes??????

t - 01:07 remaining in year.

i'm smokin sum good stuff and going out. laters everyone, have fun

learn English

[DABANSHEE (154661)]

I took the initiative in creating the Internet

That has 2 interprestations:

1/ I took the initiative by creating the internet

2/ The initiative I took led to the creation of the internet.

Obviously he ment interpretation 2, as, if he meant interpretation 1 he would have just said it. The fact is the difference between in & by means alot, even though those definitions overlap.

Re:Help from the UK?

[I Am The Owl (531076)]

No.

Correction Also Posted

[tbmaddux (145207)]

The author of the original article followed up with a correction [ietf.org] in which he stated:

In my recent message about the creation of the Internet by the conversion of the ARPAnet from NCP to TCP/IP, I incorrectly named Vint Cerf as the Responsible Parent at ARPA. Actually, the Responsible Parent at ARPA during conversion was Bob Kahn; Vint had left ARPA for MCI before that date. There are enough slightly-incorrect "facts" about the early history of the Internet floating around, without my inadvertantly creating a new non-fact!

Bob Braden

T shirts

[by Anonymous Coward]

There may still be a few remaining T shirts that read, "I Survived the TCP/IP Transition".

And sadder still, some of their owners are still wearing them...

Ask /.

[teamhasnoi (554944)]

Al Gore asked me how to FTP over TCP/IP using PCMCIA while singing 'YMCA' in full violation of the DMCA, angering the RIAA. What was I saying again?

Who's old school?

[mayns (524760)]

So how many of you were on the internet in those dark ages? just curious.

Re:Who's old school?

[by Anonymous Coward]

I was hanging around Berkeley learning Unix in 1983 (4.2 BSD). I remember losing all of my illegal accounts in Jan 1984 so I think it was 1984 before UCB was putting the whole campus on the Net and consequently tightening up security that year. But losing my accounts did seem like a dark 1984ish thing. I first saw the net in 1982 and had net access in 1983. In 1982 I saw Berkeley + MIT machines on the net so it definitely existed then. Computing was seriously fun then, learning Unix from reading the 4.2 BSD tech reports, Lyons and BSD sourcecode on pdp11 and vax. I remember the laminated Unix man pages in Cory hall -- it seemed so impressive.

Re:Who's old school?

[MrChuck (14227)]

Does it count that I was using whatever it was to send mail from my college to my brother's in 1983?

Lesse, we connect to UMass/Amh who connected to UMass/Boston who connected to Harvard who connected to U/CT who connected to Wesleyan.

You had to get the bang path just so.

How many people had business cards with ! paths?
Even "domain!uunet"

Let's recall that the "Internet" was an agreggation of several nets, including Arpa-Net and that many schools were somehow attached. Bitnet gateways (@rutgers) to the Arpanet basically counted. Telnet over, login as guest/guest and go to the next stop.

Re:Who's old school?

[Gorobei (127755)]

My first Usenet post was over 20 years ago: 1982-04-24.

In the snow. Uphill. Both ways.

Re:Who's old school?

[messiertom (590151)]

Search for it on Google Groups (formerly Dejanews). A simple search for your name (unless it's John Doe or something) should bring it up (sort by date is nice). It's good memorabilia.

it's terrible memorabillia

[SweetAndSourJesus (555410)]

I was posting on usenet when i was 14 years old, and now the folly of my youth haunts me.

There's a permanent record of what an idiot I am.

Re:it's terrible memorabillia

[TheOnlyCoolTim (264997)]

Everyone's an idiot at 14 years old. It's the people whose development stops there that are the problem.

Tim

Wow!

[JayBlalock (635935)]

Just one more year, and the Internet can drink! Think of the fun we'll have then!

Cool!

[Tablizer (95088)]

Let's celebrate by slashdotting something really big!

Re:Cool!

[by Anonymous Coward]

RIAA or MPAA anyone?

Oh let me get my popcorn!

[reaper20 (23396)]

Too bad that the last five years have seen the decline of the original intent of the internet to degrade to a cesspool of spam, RIAA/MPAA crap, popups, overmarketization, the ZD "stupidity factor" and other pure bullshit that we put up with every day.

Anyone else harking for the days of gopher and html 3.2? Sure, the "market capitilization" was horrible, but you know what, NNTP was actually useful back then. No google? Some industrous person on would point you to the right place, as a common courtesy. Sharing of knowledge. Ahhhh ... the good old days.

Now we're deluged with a flash-crippled web with no regards to any kind of standards, where any moron can masquerade as a "developer" and make a ton of money for being an idiot. yeah, I may sound stupid in today's context, but someone like Alan Ralsky was impossible back in the day.

Bring back the meritocracy of the internet - you remember? The place where you were entitled to an opinion if you were intelligent enough to actually learn and connect.

Discriminatory? Hell yes, mod me down. Being more intelligent than the average Joe never hurt anyone....

Re:Oh let me get my popcorn!

[Magus311X (5823)]

Ah...

The days of using a 2400 baud modem on my 486 to dial in to the local high school. You had shell on a VAX, you used lynx and kermit.

All for $10 a year! This was when ISPs where still hourly!

Ah... I remember upgrading to 9600 baud, and 14400 (PPP!). Those were the days...
-----

Re:Oh let me get my popcorn!

[plugger (450839)]

Forums, irc channels and newsgroups still exist where knowledge is shared and people learn. Yes, in general there is a lot of noise, but there are still places where the majority are intelligent and courteous.

An interesting thing I noticed was that when I started using Linux, setting up web bookmarks for FAQs, HOWTOs, etc, the web seems less and less commercial. I guess it looks like whatever you are looking for (if that makes any sense).

btw, it's the early hours of New Year's day, so no apologies for rambling on :)

Funny.

[mindstrm (20013)]

If you mean the web.. fine.

Nowadays though..
you can route your PBX through a VOIP provider and get really cool phone service, and rates, from anywhere you can get bandwidth.
We trade entire movies online like it ain't no big thing.
Same for music.

Videoconferencing. You may not have seen high quality video conferencing via the internet.. but I sure have.. and it is indeed impressive.

Education. It's easier than ever to look up any kind of information now than ever before.. increased advertising yes.. but also increased information. Howstuffworks.com and it's type are awesome learning tools, for all ages.

Open forums, debates, person info like blogs, are huge now. Don't care? Maybe not.. but it's fairly easy to see what othe rpeople really think. Go back to reading magazines if you want... think some guy who failed highschool, has an iq of 40.. you don't want his opinion on something? Don't want to know what he thinks? You should, because he votes.

Etc.

Re:Oh let me get my popcorn!

[miu (626917)]

Anyone else harking for the days of gopher and html 3.2? Sure, the "market capitilization" was horrible, but you know what, NNTP was actually useful back then. No google? Some industrous person on would point you to the right place, as a common courtesy. Sharing of knowledge. Ahhhh ... the good old days.

And you could talk to very cool people on Usenet or though email: Vinge, Effinger, Abrash, and Hawking.

Microsoft had never even thought about the Internet, Spamford and his ilk were not yet at work, AOL was in it's own little ghetto, no javascript, no P2P, and no one was around to interupt our own little elitist world. I do miss some of the things about the weird old days.

Re:Oh let me get my popcorn!

[evilviper (135110)]

Now we're deluged with a flash-crippled web with no regards to any kind of standards

I'm not! If I come across a 'crippled' web-site, I won't use it, nor will I go there again.

YOU make the web. So, next time you feel like complaining about how terrible flash is, uninstall it from your computer instead. Next time you get annoyed by a pop-up, (of if you, like myself, have the slightest concern for privacy and security) disable javascript and be done with it.

If you don't like distracting animations, disable GIF animations, and you won't be bothered again.

For all your complaining, you haven't accomplished anything. I was annoyed like you by many MANY things on the web... but instead of complaining on slashdot, I installed Privoxy (before it was even under that name) and wrote up a few regex filters that eliminate almost every annoyance I've ever come across. CmdrTaco (and most other webmasters) may not be smart enough to dump the white backgrounds (in favor of any other color that you can look at without feeling like your eyes are being crushed) but that doesn't mean I have to be forced to look look at it that way.

Ah, I remember getting my first CRT. . .

[kfg (145172)]

and thinking, " You know, someday this will be in color, and text will be WYSIWYG and the screen will look like *paper*, with black text."

I was a visionary in my 30's. And I was right. We got it, and it was good, in fact it was awsome.

I was also a naive twit in my 30's. Nowadays I've "devolved" into reading mail in text mode using mutt. Dark background, white 80 column text you can read from halfway across a thirty foot room, and it's good. In fact, it's awsome.

A CRT isn't paper. Different rules apply. Your eyes, and the eyes of your readers, will thank you for realizing this.

Ah well, at least it's better than those websites that print black text on a textured navy blue background.

KFG

Re:Ah, I remember getting my first CRT. . .

[evilviper (135110)]

Dark background, white 80 column text you can read from halfway across a thirty foot room, and it's good. In fact, it's awsome.

I `inherited' an old qvt-109 terminal (new, in box)... It's been so long, I didn't remember how much nicer amber was on the eyes. It's a damn shame modern monitors (anything with more than 16 colors) don't have the good ol' monochrome button in the back. If something like that was released today, it would be considered a revolution in ergonomics.

But still, nobody figures it out.

A CRT isn't paper. Different rules apply. Your eyes, and the eyes of your readers, will thank you for realizing this.

I always explain to people that reading black text from a white page on a computer screen is like reading the label of a flourscent lightbulb. In fact, the only difference between the two is the refresh rate.

The difference between paper and screen is quite simple... Books aren't backlit, so the light you see when reading, is polarized.

I'm leading up to something here

What that means, is that we need monitors that are NOT backlit. I've heard that the color gameboy screens do exactly this, and are very low-power to boot. So, I can't help but wonder why no one has come forward with a `front-lit' monitor, and sold each for several times what they are worth. That, in fact, is the only barrier left to the paperless office/home. Hey, if everyone's eyes weren't getting burned by looking at a computer screen, they just might read an e-book, rather than printing everything out, just so they can read it once and throw it away.

Meanwhile, millions is spent on ergonomics, electronic paper, tablets, etc. Just manufacture one new monitor, and you too can change the world.

Hey, at this point, I'd be happy with a 10 inch, Black & White, LCD display. It's ironic that the high-end handheld do away with the much easier to read greyscale LCDs.

Ah well, at least it's better than those websites that print black text on a textured navy blue background.

Actually, I don't mind that very much. Hit CTRL+A and all the text will be highlighted, giving the text the contrast it needs.

Dark pictures on dark backgrouds are another story.

But... White backgrounds are everywhere... I don't run into any other terrible design decisions even 1/10o0th as much.

And yet, nobody ever learns. I still don't know why. It's a monkey-see-monkey-do mentality, I suppose.

Re:Oh let me get my popcorn!

[JaredOfEuropa (526365)]

"Anyone else harking for the days of gopher and html?"

The Internet of those days to me is more or less the same as today's Internet: a means of data transport. For what it's worth, that transport now reaches much more people than it did way back when, and at greater speeds also. Don't fall into that delusion that many ISP's suffer from: that they somehow have to offer content as well as transport.

"Bring back the meritocracy of the internet - you remember? The place where you were entitled to an opinion if you were intelligent enough to actually learn and connect."

The great achievement of the Internet is that it has given a voice (or medium or whatever) to whomever needs one. Sure, that includes the crackpots, spammers, lousy web designers, Flash users, and so on and so forth. Internet is no longer the plaything of the elite at universities and defense organisations, as it was 10 years ago. As a result, there is more worthwhile stuff on the Internet than ever there was in the past, but there is a corresponding increase in crap, which one has to sort through to get to the meat. But the crap goes hand in hand with the good stuff... culling the crap would probably mean curtailing essential freedoms that leads to the good stuff.

Re:Oh let me get my popcorn!

[m00nun1t (588082)]

Gopher? Luxury!! Aye, when I was a lad we used to dream of the day we'd 'ave gopher. I'd 'ave to get oop at 4am, stick an ethernet cable oop me nose and sniff in binary just to get me email.

Filk inspiration!

[KC7GR (473279)]

I just can't resist. Remember what you all need to sing at midnight in your respective time zone...

Should older packets become dumped
and never brought online,
Let newer packets take their place
on all our T-1 lines!

(I wonder if my older karma will be forgotten?)

And Goodbye Privacy

[smagruder (207953)]

We will look back at the birth of the Internet as the beginnings of the death of privacy, for better or worse. My friends, we have entered the Transparent Age.

We are quickly headed toward a time where economic advantage will be directly proportional to how much privacy is given up. Those who will work the hardest to keep everything in their lives private will become the new underclass.

Yay, happy birthday Internet!

[wackybrit (321117)]

Rather conveniently, only those geeky enough to celebrate this anniversary get to learn this news, since everyone else is out on the biggest party night of the year.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY INTERNET!!

January 2nd

[E-Rock-23 (470500)]

The day after the Internet was born is also a red letter date in the online world. It brought with it the following historical firsts:

The First Blog.
The First Troll
The Basic Concept of goatse.cx was allowed to begin forming.
A Synapse in Rob Malda's head fired, marking the beginnings of what would become Slashdot.
The First Pirate dipped his toe into brave new waters.
The First Internet Download Queen, Billie Jean King, was crowned.
The Fires of Mount St. Helens rumbled in faraway Washington, signaling the rise of the Dark Lord Gates and the writing of the One OS
Al Gore said that the second day of his greatest invention was going very well.
The birth of the first newsgroup, alt.news.cultureclub (hey, it was the 80's!)
The First "Stephen King, Dead at 35" Post
One year later, George Orwell, You Do The Math

Happy New Year, everyone. May your night be moderated +1(Kickass)

Re:January 2nd

[by Anonymous Coward]

A Synapse in Rob Malda's head fired, marking the beginnings of what would become Slashdot.

Jan 1, 2003: The second synpapse in Rob Malda's head fired, resulting in a duplicate article.

NCP eh

[evilviper (135110)]

So, the internet left NCP 20 years ago... How long until Novell figures it out?

Repeat after me... It's a Joke, It's a Joke, It's a Joke. And when you tell me about factual inaccuracies, guess what I'm going to tell you?

IETF info

[ScubaS (600042)]

Bob is a great member for the IETF's mailing list. It is not everyday that people are actually watching out for special occassions such as the 20th aniversary of the Internet using the TCP/IP protocol. The NCP protocol is so old that it is basically unheard of today. I know that there will be more than one New Years Eve for us this week! Nobody can predict what the internet would be like if ARPANET was still using the NCP protocol for internet communications. All I can say about that is, maybe it is time for the Internet's Rebirth and phase out TCP/IP for something that is easier on the internet's precious bandwidth and high latency.

The next 20 years

[buttahead (266220)]

So who can guess where we will be 20 years from now? Wide scale broadband using IPv6? Small scale super broadband using an IP replacement?

What's going on with the Internet v2.0? Will it also be spun into a commercial media frenzy?

Anyone care to venture some guesses? Now taking bets; I'm sure you will be able to track me down 2 decades from now.

Evolution rather than revolution

[wiggys (621350)]

The last major net revolution was probably in the mid nineties. By then we had animated .gifs, jpegs, database-driven web pages, Flash, Java and Javascript.

Has there really been anything new since then? I mean, since the WWW was born, the internet hasn't really advanced much. Sure, we've seen gradual improvements in bandwidth, HTML, CSS, scripting languages and so on, but there hasn't really been anything NEW.

Well, I hate to say it, but. . .

[kfg (145172)]

that's generally a sign of maturation of any technology. It happens. There's only so much "new" to go around, and then you've used it up.

You can see signs of it throughtout the entire computer industry too. They're starting to sell chrome like it's a technological feature. They only have to do that when they've run out of *actual* new technological features to sell. "Buy our OS, it's got prettier widgets and shit."

There was that "smell-O-vision" thingy that someone said they were working on a while ago. Man, just wait to you get hit with a "popup" perfume ad with that sucker. Maybe nothing new is a Good Thing?

KFG

The Internet was up well before 1983

[Animats (122034)]

The Internet was up well before 1 JAN 1983. That was just the date that the old ARPANET NCP people had to switch over. I had machines on the Internet more than 20 years ago, and so did others.

Here's an Internet host list from 1981:

• Date: 5 Oct 1981 1358-PDT
• 
  From: POSTEL at USC-ISIF
  To: mike.bmd70 at BRL
  

  27-May-81 16:52 JBP

  GATEWAYS

  • DCEC-EDN/ARPA
  • MIT-LCS/ARPA
  • BBN-RCC/ARPA
  • BBN-SAT/ARPA
  • NDRE-SAT/ARPA
  • COMSAT-SAT/COMSAT
  • UCL-SAT/UCL
  • UCL-SAT/NULL
  • UCL-UCL/RSRE
  • RSRE-NULL/PPSN
  • RSRE-NULL/PPSN
  • SRI-PR1/ARPA
  • SRI-PR2/ARPA
  • BBN-BBNPR/ARPA
  • Bragg-BraggPR/ARPA

  COMPUTERS

  • ALTA-COMA
  • BBN-UNIX
  • BBN-VAX
  • BBNA
  • BBNB
  • BBNC
  • BBND
  • BBNE
  • BBNF
  • BBNG
  • EDN-HOST1
  • EDN-HOST3
  • EDN-UNIX
  • ISIB
  • ISIC
  • ISID
  • ISIE
  • ISIF
  • MIT-DevMultics
  • MIT-Multics
  • UCLA-CCN 3033

Reminising

[peterdaly (123554)]

My first collection of bookmarks was scrawled on paper, and titled "Servers", since none of us had heard of "Bookmarks" yet.

Anyone have an old copy of the Internet Yellowpages sitting in their shelf? (Or in their basement...)

I remember how cool we though it was to download gif images of weather maps from University of Michigan. We didn't have to wait for the news to see an up to date weather map! Think of how commonplace that is today.

-Pete

Re:Reminising

[zaren (204877)]

My first collection of bookmarks was scrawled on paper, and titled "Servers", since none of us had heard of "Bookmarks" yet.

My collection was scrawled on the labels of various 1.4 meg floppies. This was back when archie was still popular, and my primary method of Internet access was dialing into my college's Prime mainframe (before most people knew they could get Internet access through their Fortran programming account) with a 2400 bps modem. I still like the sound of a 2400 connecting the best :)

*toasts*

[kien (571074)]

Here's to free-thinkers...may they continue to retain the right to question things.

Here's to academics...may they continue their research.

Here's to the hacker ethic which played a large part in the creation of the Net.

And here's to all of you /. people, whether friend, foe, or freak; you make me think.

Happy New Year!

--K.

Just 1 more year...

[ThresholdRPG (310239)]

... until you're old enough to drink, Internet!

Until then, I guess you have to stick to what you're best at: porn and gambling.

Happy Birthday Internet!

It seems like just yesterday...

[mtec (572168)]

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and there was no Spam.
And the Spirit of God moved slowly through modems.
And God said, Let there be speed: and there was speed.
And God saw the speed, that it was good: and God divided the slow from the fast.
And God called the speed true Broadband Internet, and the slow he called AOL.
And the evening and the morning were the first day.

(apologies)

Re:what was NCP?

[by Anonymous Coward]

NCP - Not Cool Protocol

TCP - Totally Cool Protocol

I think you can see why they made the switch!

(IP, obviously, is short for "Intellectual Property")

Re:NCP and TCP/IP

[Russ Steffen (263)]

Ummm, no.

While NCP can also mean Netware Core Protcol, in this case it means "Network Control Protocol", a much older protocol that dates back to the beginning of the ARPAnet circa 1970, and has squat to do with Netware.

NCP is documented in RFCs 55, 60, 215 and several others.

Re:NCP and TCP/IP

[AtrN (87501)]

Others got NCP luckily and the "T" in "TCP" doesn't stand for "transfer". See,

RFC: 793

TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL

Re:NCP and TCP/IP

[evilviper (135110)]

You know something, ships had ports for hundreds of years before electricity was even discovered.

Electrical devices had ports decades before computers were invented.

Computers had ports lone before TCP was invented.

And don't even get me started on 'dongles'.

And please allow me to point out the irony that you, yourself, are one of those people who are NOT "in the know".

Re:effect on efficiency

[markov_chain (202465)]

I prefer today's Internet to the one 7 years ago, when I first tried it out, thank you.

The amount of information available on the 'Net is incredible-- not to mention that it is also decently indexed and searchable. For example, suppose I decide, on a whim, that I would like to know what the Hungarians call linden trees. Search for the latin name for linden, then google for that together with the Hungarian country code: "tilia tree site:.hu." The result pops up as the first hit! This kind of detailed information did not exist in the early years.

I am loath to think about what I would have to do to find this out without the 'net. I would need to find a pretty good university library, travel there, grovel to get access, and then spend time doing research. Thank goodness for progress!