The big web!

Beginning as a tool for a select group of engineers and scientists associated with academia or government and evolving rapidly into the World Wide Web open to anyone with a computer and a telephone connection, the Internet has transformed the way we conduct research, communicate, and make purchases ranging from groceries and airline tickets to the latest books and music or clothing and furniture. The Internet evolved over time into what it is today, but origins of the Internet began as a US government-funded network intended to provide a non-localized, redundant means of communication between military, scientific, educational and government entities, should a nuclear strike occur. Ideas for the Internet developed contemporaneously in many cases. How we got from there to here on the information highway, is the story of a host of individuals and breakthrough thinking.
What is your greatest fear? How can you conquer your fear?
One of the greatest challenges that man faces is clarity of thought in the face of adversity. The greatest fear of any African I know is death. We are dead in comparison to the progress of the progressive world yet when it comes to “death” (the separation of soul and body) we seem to struggle at all costs to “live”. It doesn’t matter if we can or cannot justify our existence or “living” we just fight and fight hard to be said to be “alive”. Maybe we should take solace in the fact that we are not the only ones afraid of “death” for to a less extent the “mighty” of the earth also fear death especially by “nuclear strike” to the extent that sleepless nights were spent in research culminating in something that we (the sleeping ones on account of the darkness of the continent), are also now benefitting from our dreaded cause. Oh, I got it all wrong, they still wanted to communicate even when faced with death from nuclear toxic exposure so their fear was not death but the lack of communication. Communicate – military, scientific, educational and government entities. The point is simple and the question is loud, what is your and yes our greatest fear and how do we intend to conquer that fear? Amazingly, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the rest of Africa take out Egypt and South Africa does not equal a tenth of the GDP of many a country in the “developed world” and yet we are not afraid, not at all! Just to be precise, it is less, far less than that of “small” Belgium.
Forget the usual rubbish let me deep strait into the cherry pie or nhopi if you like. The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location, time, color or creed. The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and team effort in the development of information infrastructure. Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the US government, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new technology. Today, terms like "takashingavanhuwe@musiyamwa.co.zw" and "http://www.donorseekers.com" trip lightly off the tongue of the random person on the street. Due to its robustness and by no means a mistake, the Internet is also referred to as the World Wide Web hence the www you type into the address bar to move from site to site. The Internet in its current form, is a widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of what is often called the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure with literally no beginning or end. Its history is complex and involves many aspects - technological, organizational, and community related. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use of online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community operations.
Sometimes I really hate history, the part where none of my own appear anywhere near the important sections. The part I really hate the most is when all the important people, our heroes, are all dead people and there is no living hero on account of no mention of the living ones when we honor our heroes. The story of the Internet is such a one that cannot be complete without technical jargon being thrown in and a special mention of the milestones and important names being made mention of. Some of the first instance of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in August 1962 (as the first head of a computer research program within the information processing office at ARPA - Advanced Research Projects Agency which changed its name to DARPA – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1971) conceptualizing his "Galactic Network". These were preceded by the January 1960 paper titled Man-Computer Symbiosis where he pioneered the call for a global network, in essence he foresaw a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. He convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept. Leonard Kleinrock (also of MIT) was instrumental in the Internet formative years having published his first paper and book on the Packet Switching Theory in July 1961 and 1964 respectively. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major milestone towards computer networking. The other key milestone was to make the computers “talk together”. In 1965 Roberts with the assistance of Thomas Merrill, connected the TX-2 computer in Mass to the Q-32 in California using a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first wide-area network ever built. The result of this experiment brought out the inadequacy of the circuit switched network and the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine. Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching was confirmed to counter the problem of wasted capacity inside assorted disparate networks.
Roberts published a plan for the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) in 1967 having developed the computer concept for a year at ARPA. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury. Scantlebury upraised Roberts of their research work at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England, as well as that of Paul Baran and others at the RAND Corporation. The RAND group wrote a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964, principally authored by Paul Baran, for the Pentagon called On Distributed Communications Networks. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work thereby solidifying the cause for packet switching technology as the foundation on which the Internet would be built. Donald Davies, of the National Physical Laboratory coined the term packet switching to describe the lab’s experimental data transmission with the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design being upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. Just to bring us up to speed, packet switching is a network communications method that groups all transmitted data, irrespective of content, type, or structure into suitably-sized blocks, called packets. The network over which packets are transmitted is a shared network which routes each packet independently from all others and allocates transmission resources as needed. The principal goals of packet switching are to optimize utilization of available link capacity and to increase the robustness of communication. Early networks used for the command and control of nuclear forces were message switched, not packet-switched, although current strategic military networks are, indeed, packet-switching and connectionless. Message switching was the precursor of packet switching, where messages were routed in their entirety, one hop at a time. Message switching systems are nowadays mostly implemented over packet-switched or circuit-switched data networks. Baran's research had approached packet switching from studies of decentralization to avoid combat damage compromising the entire network.
In August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA affiliated researchers had refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ (request for quote) was floated by DARPA for the development of one of the key components, the packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP's), and was subsequently won in December 1968 by a group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized by Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) by Kleinrock's team. Due to Kleinrock's early development of packet switching theory and his focus on analysis, design and measurement, his Network Measurement Center at UCLA was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET in 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer was connected. The first ARPANET link was established between the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and the Stanford Research Institute on the 29th of October 1969. By December 5, 1969, a 4-node network had been created by adding the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara. By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added approximately every twenty days. ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used. ARPANET development was centered around the Request for Comments (RFC) process, still used today for proposing as well as distributing Internet Protocols and Systems. Doug Engelbart's project on "Augmentation of Human Intellect" (which included NLS (oN-Line System), an early hypertext system) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) provided a second node. SRI supported the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler and including functions such as maintaining tables of host name to address mapping as well as a directory of the RFC's. One month later, when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first host-to-host message was sent from Kleinrock's laboratory to SRI. Two more nodes were added at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and University of Utah. These last two nodes incorporated application visualization projects, with Glen Culler and Burton Fried at UCSB investigating methods for display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over the net, and Robert Taylor and Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating methods of 3-D representations over the net. Thus, by the end of 1969, four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet was off the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the networking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on how to utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day.
Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software. In December 1970 the Network Working Group (NWG) working under S. Crocker finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). As the ARPANET sites completed implementing NCP during the period 1971-1972, the network users finally could begin to develop applications. In October 1972 Kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC) by linking 40 machines and a Terminal Interface Processor. This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It was also in 1972 that the initial "hot" application, electronic mail, was introduced. In March 1973 Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In sending the first message to himself to test it out, he uses the @ sign—the first time it appears in an e-mail address. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. In September 1973, Kahn and Vinton Cerf, an electrical engineer and head of the International Network Working Group, present a paper at the University of Sussex in England describing the basic design of the Internet and an open-architecture network, later known as TCP (transmission control protocol), that will allow networks to communicate with each other. The paper is published as "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection" in IEEE Transactions on Communications. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic which we tend to take for granted.
“Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human race as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano eruption, but the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis. The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nano technologies—each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we’re still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.
But here’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.”
With enough minds, all tomorrows are visible!
“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.