I believe that these two early maps of ARPANET in 1973 and 1977 respectively are very valuable. As a software engineer, my early career was dedicated in a project for developing TCP/IP stack. There is a undescribable intimate emotion every time when I look at these pictures. :)
ARPANET in 1973
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| ARPANET Logical Map in May 1973 |
ARPANET in 1977
4 years late since 1973, no big change. At early stage of the Internet, everything
evolved at snail speed, not like today's rocket speed.
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| ARPANET Logical Map in Mar 1977 |
ARPANET stands for Advanced Research Project Agency Network, which is the first wide-range packet switching network. Now, Internet basically controls human race! No one can even imagin life without connection to the Internet any more. It is nearly impossble. Human kind has no way back definitely.
Design Purpose of ARPANET
Even though the ARPANET project was established by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) of the United States Deparment of Defense, the original goal was not to build a Command and Control System which could survive nuclear war, even though most of people tend to believe this. According to Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965–1967):
The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would
survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was,
clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in
fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET
came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large,
powerful research computers in the country, and that many research
investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated
from them. (cited from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET)
The idea to connect super computers across a wide geographical range for researchers sparked ARPANET. Somehow hard to believe, right!?...... If you continue to read the article from wiki I cited above, it seems that later in 1970s, DARPA acknowledged the nuclear war goal.
Features of Internet
In general, we can conclude that the Internet has these important features below, some of them are the orginal design goal, and some of them are emerged as it evolves:
- decentralized
- packet-switching
- interoperability
- resource-sharing
- multi-application
- easy to use
- high performance
- large volumn
- security and privacy
Not only computers are connected with each other, but also more and more equipments and devices are connected. They are called IoT, Internet of Things.
Anyway, these days the most cool thing for the Internet I reckon is the StarLink, which makes the whole planet surrounded with wireless signals of Internet. Connecting to the Internet becomes a very basic human right. And I also believe that in the near future, we could have a high speed wireless Internet connection with Mars. No doubt about it. One of the important missions after landing on Mars has to be connecting to the internet of mother Earth.
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