That day while I was making some reports for the office, the internet suddenly went off. This is happening almost every day nowadays. I was already running late, the mood got worse😒 Sitting at my desk wondering if I can get some other work done as long as there is no internet or if I should call the service provider. At that moment, I heard a sound coming from behind my 3 X 3 cube on the desk. It's like when a person is depressed, and he sighs frequently and moans. I looked carefully, and saw Kenno 🐛 is looking at me with a sad face. I asked “Why on earth are you sitting here with such a sullen face? What happened?”

It replied, "What if the Internet doesn't come back on? What if all the earth's electrical connections were cut off? what will you do then?" and became even more disappointed.

It was very strange to see it like that. I asked with a smile “Why are you having so much trouble thinking about all these impossible things?” Hearing this, he said in a sobbing voice “No, no, is everything impossible? Imagine one day actually the Internet of the entire world would shut down, forever because of a natural disaster or a digital virus? then? ”

I said, “This is not possible at all, the technology is now quite modern and advanced. After a while the internet will come back on as it does every time. ”

It said, "How can you say that so confidently? What do you even know about the Internet? ” I woke up before I could answer that question and discovered that the internet is back on again. I didn't realize when I fell asleep thinking random stuff. Though I couldn't answer Kenno's last question that day, the question kept popping up in my head. Really, what do I know about the Internet? So I decided to compile all of the relevant facts about the internet, try to figure out how likely it is that the internet will abruptly and permanently shut down across the world, and publish my current understanding and findings about the internet via the internet itself😇... “So help me God!”

Though the internet we use today is a result of contributions made by many people over many years, the ARPANET is considered the direct predecessor to the Internet and the first wide-area packet switching network. The project laid the foundation of the internet and also made it to the IEEE milestones list. I'll try to emphasize important aspects of the project that, in my opinion, constitute the foundations of the present internet.

1. History

On 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program, the first artificial Earth satellite Sputnik 1 was launched by the Soviet Union. The successful launch came as a shock to experts and citizens in the United States. And four months later On February 7, 1958 in response to the launching of Sputnik 1the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was formed (NASA was founded on 29th July 1958). In March 1972, The name ARPA was changed to DARPA. In February 1993, it changed back to ARPA. In March 1996, again renamed to DARPA.

I don't know about you, but these historical occurrences astound me, especially given how easily I can browse the internet on my smartphone today.

The purpose of DARPA was to form & execute various R&D projects (Science & Tech) not limited to military requirements. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was one of the many projects of DARPA. On October 29 1969, at 10:30 P.M, the first message on the ARPANET was sent and BOOM! 🚀The earliest predecessor of the ✨Internet was born✨ Then in September 1984 a separate network MILNET was created for unclassified defense department communications and split away from ARPANET and finally after the introduction of the NSFNET in 1990 the amazing project was officially decommissioned.

2. Packet-Switching

In the early 1960s, Paul Baran, a Polish-American engineer at the RAND Corporation in the United States and Donald Davies, a Welsh computer scientist at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the United Kingdom independently studied the concept of switching small blocks of data. During the Cold War, the goal was to build a "survivable" communications system that could retain connectivity between end points despite damage from nuclear missiles. The research focused on three main concepts: the deployment of a decentralized network with many paths between any two places, the division of user messages into message blocks, and the delivery of these messages using store and forward switching. In 1965 Donald Davies developed a similar message routing concept and called it packet switching. A cute animation of packet switching can be found here.

On 3 April 1990, in an interview conducted by Judy O'Neill of Oral History Association Leonard Kleinrock, an American computer scientist under whose supervision the first message on the ARPANET was sent, said that his idea of a message switching network was a precursor to the packet switching networks. But his claims are disputed, Paul Baran Donald and Davies are only recognized for independently inventing the concept of digital packet switching used in modern computer networking including the Internet. However, in Hobbes' Internet Timeline 25 the Ph.D. Thesis paper Information Flow in Large Communication Nets of Leonard Kleinrock, MIT is mentioned as the first paper on packet-switching (PS) theory.

3. Networked Computers

An Internet Pioneer Ponders the Next Revolution is an interview excerpt where Robert Taylor, an American Internet pioneer talks about how the idea of computer networking was conceived, his journey with ARPA & Xerox.

In March 1960, J. C. R. Licklider, an American psychologist and computer scientist, wrote a paper called Man-Computer Symbiosis where he discussed “expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers”.

In 1968 Robert William Taylor with J. C. R. Licklider wrote a white paper called The Computer as a Communication Device where ideas like accessing a speaker’s primary data without interrupting him during a meeting held through a computer, exchanging magnetic tapes by messenger or mail, development of multiaccess systems with interactivity, communication cost per hour, On-line interactive communities, “on-line interactive vicarious expediter and responder” were discussed. And finally it was predicted that "Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever…”

4. Interface Message Processor

From the late 1960s through 1989, the Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet switching node that interconnected participant networks to the ARPANET. It was the first generation of gateways, or routers as they are currently known.

In April 1967, in a design session on technical standards held by ARPA Lawrence Gilman Roberts, an American engineer and a program manager of the ARPA IPTO advocated that all mainframe computers be connected directly to each other. The other investigators were apprehensive about allocating considerable computational resources to network management. According to Wesley Clark, an American physicist who is credited for designing the first modern personal computer, minicomputers should be utilized as an interface to establish a message switching network. Clark's concept was adopted into the ARPANET plan, and the minicomputers were given the name Interface Message Processors by Roberts.

5. 1822 Protocol, NCP & TCP/IP

The 1822 protocol, which governed the relaying of messages to an IMP, was the starting point for host-to-host communication on the ARPANET in 1969. But the 1822 protocol proved insufficient for handling multiple connections among different applications running on a host computer, and the Network Control Program (NCP) was created to solve this problem by providing a standard set of network services that could be shared by multiple applications running on a single host computer. As a result, application protocols evolved that operated independently of the underlying network service, allowing for independent advancements in the underlying protocols.

NCP was a two-way communication protocol that used two port addresses and established two connections. Each application layer program or protocol had an odd and even port assigned to it. TCP and UDP standardization decreased the need for two simplex ports for each application to just one duplex port. The NCP interface allowed application software to connect to the ARPANET by implementing higher-level communication protocols, which was an early example of the protocol layering notion, eventually adopted in the OSI model, which I'll explore in a future post.

The Internet protocol suite, popularly known as TCP/IP, was developed by the DARPA in the late 1960s. DARPA began work on a number of alternative data transmission technologies after launching the groundbreaking ARPANET in 1969. In 1972, American electrical engineer Robert E. Kahn joined the DARPA IPTO, where he worked on both satellite packet networks and ground-based radio packet networks, and saw the utility in being able to communicate across both. In 1973, Vinton Cerf, an American Internet pioneer who assisted in the development of the current ARPANET Network Control Program (NCP) protocol, teamed up with Kahn to build the ARPANET's next generation of protocol.

Instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the existing ARPANET protocols, Kahn and Cerf devised a fundamental reformulation in which the differences between local network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and this function was delegated to the hosts. Initially, the TCP handled both datagram transmissions and routing, but as collaborators gained more experience with the protocol, they advocated splitting the functionality into layers of different protocols. The packet routing layer's version number moved from 1 to 4 during the protocol's development, with the latter being deployed in the ARPANET and NCP was formally rendered obsolete. On January 1, 1983 ARPANET switched its core networking protocols from NCP to the more versatile and powerful TCP/IP protocol suite, marking the beginning of the modern Internet. It became known as Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) as the protocol that is still in use in the Internet, alongside its current successor, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).

Wow! I'm just overwhelmed, so much has happened in those 21 years, I think I need a break now 😫 To be honest, I haven't yet mastered the skills required to cover the entire history of ARPANET in a single post, but I haven't been able to find respite without doing so. But I'm glad I gave it a shot. I'd like to think of this piece as an homage to the ancestors of the Internet💮🙏

I sincerely admit that, along with innovative concepts like networked computers, packet switching, and IMP, there are many key ideas, theories, technologies and eminent individuals and organizations that I failed to mention in this essay that are responsible for ARPANET's inception and evolution. I would not have been able to publish this post online without the technologies created during the development of ARPANET, and you would not have had to go through my torture either🤣😂🤣

However, in the aftermath of the ARPANET's decommissioning on February 28, 1990, Vinton Cerf penned the following lamentation:

Requiem of the ARPANET

It was the first, and being first, was best,

but now we lay it down to ever rest.

Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.

For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years

of faithful service, duty done, I weep.

Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.

Interesting Facts

1. At 10:30 pm PST on 29 October 1969 the first message successfully transmitted over the ARPANET was "lo" 🤔 Charley Kline, a UCLA student programmer, supervised by Kleinrock, transmitted from the university's SDS Sigma 7 host computer, installed Boelter Hall 3420, the school's main engineering building to the Stanford Research Institute's SDS 940 host computer. The original message was “login” but the system crashed after transmitting the first two characters “lo”. However, kline's second attempt to login with the message "login" was successful🚀 approximately an hour later.

2. After a meeting in England in 1973, Leonard Kleinrock claims to have done the first illegal act on the Internet by sending a request for the return of his electric razor🤦🏻‍♂️ Using the ARPANET for personal reasons was illegal at the time.

3. Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent out the first mass email to roughly 400 potential clients via the ARPANET in 1978, breaking the network's rules. He claimed, this led in $13 million in DEC product sales, demonstrating the power of email marketing.

Finally, I believe that as long as mankind exists the internet will not be abolished, and that this is true beyond the need to develop a "survivable" communications system during the Cold War, or beyond simply a military or political response to the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite... "Man's yearning to communicate via computers!" was the driving force behind the Project ARPANET.

Hello there 👋 Thank you very much for taking the time to read this post🙏 Please feel free to share your ideas, recommendations, comments and questions. Also, if you've written something or have a reference on the same subject, kindly share it with me and I'll do my best to read it. I'll see you again later🙂