GETTING CONNECTED

Before there was the internet, there was the ARPANET. Ian Evenden speaks to some of those who were there, and discovers how they set about building something that had barely been imagined

- Ian Evenden

THE IDEA OF A NETWORK which spans the entire world is not a new one by any means. As far back as 1900, Nikola Tesla was dreaming of wireless power and message transmission, though sadly despite his claims, the chances are the wireless power part of the system would never have worked.

Thinkers and theorists kicked the idea around for much of the early 20th century, coming up with ways that information could be stored and accessed long before the technology to build them was actually available. MIT computer scientist and later ARPA office head, JCR Licklider, put forward the somewhat optimistic idea of an ‘intergalactic computer network’ in the early 1960s, but his work did a lot to ground the idea in reality instead of science-fiction. His ideas about an all-encompassing computer network contain almost everything the internet is today, including the cloud, simple user interfaces, AI, and ‘time sharing’—the idea of a central server accessed via several terminals at the same time.

Another concept is that of packet switching, breaking a stream of data down into parts, each with a header detailing where it’s going, that allows network hardware to make sure it ends up in the right place. This allows multiple computers to communicate on a single network, the data passing through routers that can decide the best route. This again came about in the 1960s, as part of research into fault-tolerant networking at the RAND Corporation, funded by the US Department of Defense, and through independent work by British scientist Donald Davies, who coined the term ‘packet switching’.