Broadband for America

The internet is a system of interconnected computers and computer networks – a network of networks – all of which use the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as the standardized system of communicating with one another.

Prior to the advent of the internet, computer networks were closed or point-to-point networks generally dedicated to allowing mainframe computers to communicate with each other with users sitting in front of IBM 3270 terminals which, for the most part, only permitted input as required by pre-written software. The teller at the window of a bank had a terminal which only gave access to that bank’s data and only by filling in fields pre-designed by the software engineers. The internet as we know it today began as a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the U.S. Department of Defense. The first ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 11:30 PM on October 29, 1969 with two more universities being added shortly thereafter. According to internet historians, “By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added approximately every twenty days.” The modern internet evolved from the establishment of the TCP/IP protocol which was adopted by DARPA (which had continued to fund internet research) in 1983. Because the internet was funded by government sources (NASA and others took over the project) commercial use was prohibited. Aside from government-to-university links, the major use of what was to become the internet in those days was for e-mail and newsgroups. For most non-government users, access was via dial-up modems which originally ran at 300 bits-per-second (baud) and were text-only if only because of their slow speeds. In the early 1990’s the internet center of gravity moved to Switzerland where the European Organization for Nuclear Development (CERN) established the concept of the World Wide Web. The development of the “web browser” as we know it today came in late 1992 from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and was named “Mosaic.” Mosaic allowed individual computer users to connect to the internet and see not just text, but full-color graphics. Every major web browser in use today has approximately the same look and feel as Mosiac. At dial-up speeds, ability to look at a painting in the New York Museum of Art on your computer screen quickly lost its appeal. The concept of the graphical interface was born but until the availability of broadband to consumers in the early 2000’s, it the true power of the web browser was not unlocked. In the early stages of the World Wide Web, there was an assumption that each user would have a unique internet protocol (IP) address expressed as 111.222.333.444 which would provide more than enough addresses every node on the internet. That, of course, was proved incorrect. Further, a system whereby a alphabetical address (www.broadbandforamerica.com) would be automatically translated into an IP address made it much easier for users to connect to favorite sites. This system remains in use today and is overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) a non-profit organization which manages the unique names and addresses thus allowing any computer on the internet to find any website. At about the same time the CERN and Mosaic projects were underway, the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, which was sponsored by then-Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, took effect which, among other things, allowed private companies to begin to use the internet for commercial purposes. In fact the “Cambrian Explosion” of internet uses and users, expanding the internet from its researcher-and-hobbyist beginnings to the astonishing depth and breadth of the internet experience today, can be directly tracked to private investment. This investment covers the range from students in dorm rooms developing new apps for a smart phone to more than $100 billion which has been invested by the major internet providers in upgrading their networks. In the thirty years which have passed since UCLA and Stanford established a computer connection the growth of the internet has been enormous. A recent study indicates that a quarter of the world’s population – about 1.7 billion people – use the internet. In North America estimates are that about 75 percent of the population are internet users. The ways we use the internet today could not have been foreseen by the researchers at DARPA 40 years ago; and would not have come to fruition without the vision of private industry over the past 25 years.