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One very smart guy at the conference, Wes Clark, was bored with the meeting. He was not at all interested in networking
but he knew Bob's plan would not work. At the end of the conference as everyone was getting ready to leave and catch their
airplane home, Wes went up to Bob and said, 'Why don't you just develop a sub-network of smaller computers to handle
the message traffic and have the big computers interface into the sub-network?' There wasn't enough time to talk about the
idea so Bob and Wes went to the airport together. There Wes explained his idea to Bob over a beer in a bar waiting for their
airplanes. Thus the idea of a message network, the Internet, was sketched out on a paper napkin. Bob took the paper napkins
back to Washington and they were incorporated into the Internet plan.
**********
Some innovations were not planned but just happened because they had too. After the first four IMPs were
installed, IMP-5 was delivered to BBN. The IMP Guys saw that they needed to see what was happening with the
other IMPs and be able to fix things without sending an Engineer to the computer. Those other IMPs were across the country.
So in the Spring of 1970 the IMP Guys started writing programs to perform remote maintenance and do diagnostics
from their location on the East coast to the IMPs on the West coast. Before long they had code in every IMP that would
automatically send a snapshot of how the IMP was feeling. Thus the IMP Guys could do preventative maintenance and fix
problems without leaving their office, to any IMP in the country.
This work was the fore runner to the Simple Network Management Protocol, SNMP, which is now used to manage networks
scattered around the world.
' i ' nternet vs. ' I ' nternet
There is a difference between internet in lower case and Internet capitalized. The term internet refers to a system of networks
basically using the same protocol. The term Internet refers to a system of network systems using multiple protocols. (Don't you
just hate it when the same word means different things?)
ARPA networking
ARPANET
Internet
|
(host-IMP)
(computer-network-gateway)
(network-internet-server)
|
(IMP-host)
(gateway-network-computer)
(server-internet-network)
|
**********
Wheelchair Willie uses Electronic Mail, email, to share ideas and keep in touch with people all over the world. In fact,
a lot of people use email. It is faster and easier to use than "snail mail", the Post Office. By far, email accounts for the
most traffic on the Internet.
An email address consists of the person's ID followed by the computer where that person has an account, i.e. WW@BigFoot.com.
As WW was reading about early email, he found the reason why there is an '@' between the person ID and the computer. The
message system computer needed a way to know where the person's ID ended, used only by the receiving computer, and
where the destination computer address started, which is used by routing programs. A quite BBN Engineer, Ray Tomlinson
, was messing around on his keyboard and picked the '@' symbol because it just seemed obvious to him
(@ means at). It was that simple and became an international standard.
**********
WW and many other people use smiley faces when they send email. Willie discovered that smiley faces and 'Emoticons' were
originally an idea in the Reader's Digest 1978. They were first used in email by Kevin MacKenzie in 1979.
Kevin wanted a way to express emotions within a message. Boy was he flamed by the establishment when he first
started using them because they disrupted the true context of the written language. Nevertheless they became
popular and widely accepted.
WW has provided some of the Emoticons he uses.
| '-) | User is winking at you |
| :-{ | User is a vampire |
| |-{ | Charlie Brownicon (Good Grief!) |
| :~) | User has broken nose |
| |~( | User has broken nose and is still in pain |
| [:-) | User is wearing a portable stereo |
| (:I | User is an egghead |
| {:-) | User wears a toupee |
| <:>== | User is a turkey |
| *:* | User is a little fuzzy |
| |:-| | User needs to loosen up |
| :^( | User's nose is out of joint |
| (:-) | User never computes without protective headgear |
| }:-( | User is bull-headed |
| -=#:-) | User is a wizard |
| .. | .. |
| Cheers, | .. |
| WW, 8-) | .. |
The first Internet Connection
made in 1969
The Internet
as it looks
today
WW Surfs the Web
Today most of us are familiar with the World-Wide Web or WWW or W3. As Willie said W3 is not the same as
the Internet. The Internet is a bunch of computers and local networks all linked together which can pass information
to and from each other using the same transmission method, TCP/IP. W3 is a type of information system that runs
over the Internet. W3 includes text, colors, graphics, motion and sound - a multimedia system. Thus the Internet is the
connection and W3 is the presentation.
While WW was looking into the origin of the Internet he also took a little time to look at the W3. Here is a little of what he found.
The proposal for the World-Wide Web was written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 while he was working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
By the beginning of 1993 there were still only 50 known HTTP servers on the Web.
In February 1993 the first version of 'Mosaic for X' was released. It was written by Marc Andreessen as a graduate student at the University of Illinois.
By the end of 1993 there were over 200 known HTTP servers.
In early 1994 Marc Andreessen formed the company that later became known as Netscape and the W3 took off. By the middle of 1994 there were over 1500 known HTTP servers.
Within two years the Web went crazy. No one knows for sure how many Web sites now exist but some estimates are over 100,000 with MILLIONs of people accessing them every day.
Wheelchair Willie thought about that for a minute. He was using the W3 all the time, just like it had always been
there. However it did not really get started until 1993, when he was already 11 years old. That was truly remarkable
and it all started with two computers in 1969. WW was about to wet his pants just thinking about what would happen in just the next five years.
Summary
One day when WW was talking with me about the Internet, he got reflective. He said,
Ya know, the Internet story is really about people, NOT computers. Those guys had ideas that the
establishment said were not possible. It is kinda like what they tell me when I say I'm going to
climb a mountain. What the egg heads did was to tell the elite 'Up Yours' and then they went and
done it anyway. Cool!
For certain Wheelchair Willie learned more than how the Internet started.
Good for him!
In a short paper, everything interesting can not be included. WW and I recommend that you look into
some of the references provided and look up some of the people. The Internet is an interesting place to investigate.
The page got full, so, click KEEP ON TRUNK'N to the reference pages,
or Take Me Home