Internet Technology - from a dream to a car part.

The very first concepts that underlay today's internet were first laid down by J.C.R. Licklider in 1962. He called his concept the Intergalactic Computer Network. This was really a set of ideas rather than anything practical, but these ideas contain much of what the internet has become.

These ideas were developed over the next 6 years and in 1969 the first implementation was carried out. The network used routers which each supported a number of computers and also connected to a number of additional routers. A router is a computer that is connected to each of the networks and its function is to transmit data between the networks. Data is transmitted in the form of packets. A packet of data is simply a piece of data that has two parts. One part is the information itself and the other part is information about the data, for instance where it has come from and to where it is going (its address). The advantage of packet switching is that different packets which may contain related data can be routed in entirely different routes through the network. This first network was known as ARPANET.

Gradually ARPANET grew from just a handful of hosts to over 40 by 1973. More and more limbs were bolted on including international satellite links.

Other networks were developed separately. For instance, in the UK an academic network called JANET was set up along with the international network IPSS. Other examples are CompuServe, Telenet, AOL along with many others.

These disparate networks used quite different methods of working and it became apparent that there was a need to unify them. The internet as we now know it started in 1974. This was the year that the internet pioneers Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine published the internet protocol which was developed into what is now known as TCP/IP. What TCP/IP did was to allow different networks to communicate with each other. TCP/IP was adopted internationally and the internet was born.

The rest, as they say, is history. Nowadays ordering and paying for an item such as car parts over the internet is common place. Mr. J.C.R. Licklider's dream is a fully fledged reality.

Paul Robini