The Legend of Network Protocols (I): ARPANET

The birth and development of the Internet is a typical basic scientific practice. It was unknown at first, but it gradually developed. It gave birth to thunder in silence and eventually became one of the greatest inventions of mankind in the 20th century. Like a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest, the storm of globalization triggered by the Internet has continued to this day, and it has led to the largest social change in the past few decades. Today, the Internet is still growing rapidly, its boundaries are constantly expanding, and it is endowed with new connotations. In the foreseeable future, it will cover every object, every corner, and every behavior in human society.

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(Photo source: Baotu.com)

In this epic Internet legend that lasted nearly half a century, we should know that the invisible basic technologies are the core that give the Internet its power. A group of technologies called "network protocols" built the Internet at the bottom and supported its voluminous upper-layer applications. In a sense, the history of the development of the Internet and its applications is equivalent to the evolution of network protocol technology. It is the technology that has made network applications and the great Internet a success. Its emergence is the most wonderful gift that some human geniuses contributed to this society at that time.

ARPANET is widely recognized as the predecessor of the modern Internet, and it laid the basic structure of the modern Internet. The ARPANET project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense and began operation in 1969. However, the most remembered technological event of that year was the Apollo moon landing of the United States and Armstrong's famous saying: "It's a small step for man, but a giant leap for mankind." In fact, if the speaker is replaced by "ARPANET", this sentence may be more true to its name, because history has proved that the emergence of the Internet is more meaningful and valuable than the successful moon landing.

Time: Cold War Begins

People often use the saying "right time, right place, and right people" to explain the reasons for the success of something, and the ARPANET can also be included in this example.

The emergence of the Internet is a legend born out of the "Cold War" and is the so-called "right time". In the mid-to-late 1940s, the competition between the two major camps of the United States and the Soviet Union in politics, economy, and military led to "an iron curtain descending over the entire European continent, and the dove of peace could not cross this iron curtain. The world was divided into the East and the West", and the prelude to the Cold War was thus opened.

In 1951, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its first atomic bomb, which marked the end of the United States' absolute strategic advantage over the Soviet Union and the beginning of a new era of the Cold War. In October 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched the world's first artificial satellite, which led to a consensus in the United States that it must catch up.

Driven by this, the US government set about creating two major agencies within one year in 1958: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The former was to develop aerospace technology to compete directly with the Soviet Union, while the latter was to study emergency technology preparations in case of a Soviet nuclear attack. The ARPANET, which was based on packet switching and was used to enhance the "self-survival" capability of the communication system, was a project supported by DARPA.

Geographical advantage: Complete technology

The "geographical advantage" of the emergence of the Internet was that the development of information technology and industry at that time was sufficient to support the emergence of the demand for computer networking.

At that time, telephone communication technology was already very mature, and low-speed information transmission using modulation and demodulation technology was not difficult. Prior to this, Nyquist's sampling theorem had been proposed, and Shannon had also completed the foundation of information theory. Next, the "packet switching" technology, which is extremely critical to the Internet, was invented in the early 1960s.

Packet switching technology builds the basic data transmission method on the Internet. Its core idea is: if you want to mail a package (deliver information) between two places, it will split the package into small packages of standard size and add information labels such as the sending address to each small package. Then these small packages will be loaded on carriers called "frames" and transported to the destination address through different lines (channels). If a frame encounters a road obstacle, the traffic police (router) will immediately let it reselect the transportation route until the small package is delivered to the destination. Finally, all the small packages that arrive at the destination will be merged and restored to the original package. At this point, the information transmission between the two places is completed. Packet switching technology was independently invented by British Donald Davies and American Paul Baran. Its advantage is that it can make full use of channel resources to avoid waste and improve the self-survival ability of the communication system.

In addition to the accumulation of technology, an obvious fact is that the computer industry at that time was entering a period of rapid development. Computer products began to be greatly enriched, and the software and hardware capabilities were sufficient to support the formation of the concept of networking. In 1946, the world's first electronic digital computer ENIAC was born in Philadelphia, USA. Two years later, the world's first computer company, Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company (EMCC), was established. In the following nearly ten years, famous companies in the history of computer development were established and launched products one after another, including Wang Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), IBM (no need to explain this), Fairchild, etc., and Fairchild became a legend in the history of science and technology because it gave birth to a large number of companies we are familiar with, such as Intel, AMD, IDT, etc.

The emergence of computer enterprise clusters directly promoted the miniaturization of computers, and the price also dropped significantly, and its application began to spread to enterprises. These ultimately catalyzed the demand for "networking" of computers, and the direct motivation for this demand was resource sharing. At that time, in order to transfer data from one computer to another, the usual practice was to first save the data on storage media such as tapes or floppy disks (1950: Yoshiro Nakamats of Tokyo Imperial University invented the floppy disk), and then transfer it to another computer with these physical media. This situation is very similar to the situation of computer applications in China in the early 1990s, which also shows how backward we were in the field of information science at that time.

Renhe: Stars shine

Experience tells us that when a technology or industry can achieve extraordinary rapid development, it is often the "talent depression effect" that is at work. In the 1960s, the computer field was like a promised land "flowing with milk and honey", attracting a large number of elites of the era to join in. At the beginning of the development of computer technology and industry, the industry was led by a large number of scientists such as Alan Turing, the "father of computer science", and John von Neumann, the "genius of the century", and there were also a large number of industry elites who helped to fuel the flames. The perfect combination of the two also contributed to the "harmony among people" factor on the eve of the birth of the Internet.

It is worth mentioning that in 1956, just ten years after the birth of computers, Shannon and others at Bell Labs proposed the term "artificial intelligence" at a salon-style academic conference, marking the emergence of artificial intelligence as an emerging discipline. Fast forward to 2016, "artificial intelligence" has become the darling of the capital market, and the man-machine battle between the world's Go masters and Alphago is seen as a perfect manifestation of artificial intelligence technology.

The right time, right place, and right people, everything is ready, only the east wind is missing. At this time, an important person appeared, who played a key "enlightening" role in the formation of the concept of the network. This person was Joseph Licklider, a professor of psychoacoustics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (later working at DARPA) - you read it right, this person is not a computer expert, of course, he also has two degrees in mathematics and physics - this is a typical "compound talent". Licklider is a model of cross-border success in the field of science, just like the Frenchman Louis Victor de Broglie who switched from history to physics and discovered matter waves. The huge contrast between his academic background and academic achievements is incredible.

Licklider's greatest contribution is his philosophical thinking about the future positioning of computers. In his view, the direction of computer development should be to provide decision-making support for human behavior to the greatest extent possible. The ultimate goal of computer development is to completely replace repetitive work at all levels of human beings, and then completely liberate human beings, who only appear as decision makers. He proposed: "Although there are only very few occasions where a large number of computers are needed to cooperate with each other in a network, it is still very important to develop integrated network operation functions." He even believes that in the near future, people's communication through machines will become more effective than face-to-face communication between people. Today, when "head-down tribes" are everywhere, we once again recall Licklider's prediction more than 50 years ago, which is simply prescient.

In 1960, Licklider published his famous computer research paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis", which marked the official emergence of the concept of computer networks. In 1962, Licklider joined DARPA and became the first director of the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO).

Internet evangelist Licklider only stayed at DARPA for two years. When the baton of IPTO was passed to Robert W. Taylor, the curtain of the specific implementation of ARPANET was officially opened. Fighting alongside Robert Taylor were Larry Roberts (L. Roberts) and other Internet pioneers.

In the summer of 1968, after a project bidding, BBN, a company founded by some MIT graduates, finally won the contract to build the ARPANET.

In fact, another important reason why ARPANET initially attracted the attention of many scientists and business circles was that they wanted to see whether the idea of ​​packet switching was feasible (the design of ARPANET required the first large-scale experimental packet switching distributed network to be possible). This is an interesting story. In the eyes of quite a few people at that time, ARPANET was just an experimental environment, and packet switching was the key point.

During the construction of the ARPANET, a practical problem was already in front of people, which was similar to the "Tower of Babel" problem in the computer world: different models of computers launched by different companies all had a unique control language and file organization method, and these structural differences made it impossible for any two different models of machines to cooperate. In the end, this problem was solved by a technology called "network protocol". Later, with the continuous innovation and evolution of network protocol technology, the ARPANET eventually transformed into today's Internet.

For more details, please see "Legend of Network Protocol (II): The Emergence of TCP"

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