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The myth that government created the internet

Michael S. Rozeff

Government supporters like to suggest that the internet is a government project. They claim that the computer industry owes its existence to the Pentagon. Neither of these claims is true. The internet grew when the Pentagon took its hands off of it. Computers were developed without the Pentagon.

These inventions have military applications and defense departments have always been very interested in them, but the defense departments did not develop them.

Actually the explosive growth of the internet occurred when the net went civilian and grew out of its military background and control. The defense department control was holding it back. Private capital and ideas poured in. It is true that people at subsidized universities and NSF grants also contributed.

If there had been none of the defense involvement, would the internet have occurred? Yes. Can we say that it was pure free market capitalism? No. We cannot say this because the major companies that would have done this anyway all had defense and government links anyway, such as IBM and ATT.

But the internet would have occurred anyway, and the lure of profits for these big companies played a role. In fact, the defense department’s ARPANET project (started in 1969) only occurred because of earlier inventions by capitalists.

IBM and ATT had major labs and were vitally interested in computers talking to one another as early as the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bell Labs invented UNIX in 1969; it made the internet possible. IBM invented FORTRAN and hard drives in 1956. Bell transmitted packet data over lines in 1958. Texas Instruments invented integrated circuits in 1958. In 1961 Leonard Kleinrock published a paper on packet switching networks. Bell Labs made the first modem in 1961. The mouse was invented in 1963. Digital Equipment Corporation produced the first minicomputer in 1964. In 1965 time sharing at MIT and mail command started. Intel began in 1968. The year 1966 saw the first use of fiber optics to carry telephone signals.

After the defense department got involved, it was still companies like Honeywell and Bolt Beranek Newman (a tiny company) that made headway on making the internet work.

There were only 500 hosts on ARPANET when it split into military and civilian sections in 1983. Then the explosive growth began.

There is much more history than this. I am sure by now there are entire books on the subject and hundreds more major internet developments of which I am blissfully unaware.

7:45 pm on October 16, 2008

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Top ten internet history myths

Posted on 26 Aug 2011 at 17:00

PC Pro contributing editor, Davey Winder, has been writing about the internet for more than 20 years. Along the way he's collected quite a few persistent internet history myths. Now’s the time to do a little debunking

1. The internet was a military network designed to survive a nuclear attack

No it wasn't, but it's easy to see why people think it was. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was certainly the first operational packet-switching network, and it was certainly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the US Government. The idea being that defence projects being carried out at universities and research labs could communicate with each other, without worrying about the unreliable network links of the late 1960s.

It was not, however, created as part of any command and control system. Nor was the notion of surviving a nuclear attack a consideration according to statements from those who were in charge at the time, including Bob Taylor who ran the project from the Pentagon and has gone on record as stating "the creation of the ARPANET was not motivated by considerations of war".

It is true that without the creation of the ARPANET there could have been no internet, but neither contemplated nuclear meltdown as a driving development factor. In actual fact, ARPANET was more about the time-sharing of research supercomputers than any weapon-based global network scenario. Two myths busted for the price of one.

2. Al Gore invented the internet

Only in his head. What the former vice president of the United States did do, as a Congressman way back in the 1970s, was promote the concept of computer “comms” as something that could be good for both commerce and education. The internet itself didn't actually exist back then, so why does the Gore myth prevail?

Well, as a Senator he was responsible for drafting legislation that helped fund internet infrastructure development in the early 1990s, one of which (the High Performance Computing and Communication Act) became known as the Gore Bill. But perhaps the most obvious reason that the myth exists is that Gore himself stated on US television in 1999 that during his time in Congress “I took the initiative in creating the internet".

The first written use of the word "internet" - shorthand for "internetworking" - seems to have been by Vint Cerf back in 1974, so Gore cannot even claim responsibility for that. Gore did, however, win a Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning work on climate change as illustrated in a 2006 documentary film, the title of which could just as easily apply to his claims of internet parenthood: An Inconvenient Truth...

3. Packet switching was an American invention

Not completely true, but not a total crock either. What actually happened was that people in the US and the UK were working on similar packet-switching techniques at pretty much the same time. The myth that is often perpetuated is that Leonard Kleinrock and Paul Baran invented packet switching which the ARPANET used in 1969. The truth is that an Englishman called Donald Davies, working at the National Physical Laboratory, was also developing a packet-switched network concept in 1965.

In 1967, a program manager with the Advanced Research Projects Agency met with Davies, and the two groups that had been independently developing the same thing started working together, with packet switching ending up at the heart of the emerging ARPANET. Interestingly, the name packet switching was taken from Davies' work.

4. The first ever email said "QWERTYUIOP"

Assuming that we accept the first email was sent between a couple of PDP-10 computers, by a network engineer working at BBN by the name of Ray Tomlinson way back in 1971 (see myth number five), then the actual content of that very first email was actually the equally boring "Testing 1-2-3".

The QWERTYUIOP myth seems to have sprung up from the fact that these represent the top row of alphabetical characters on a keyboard, and no other reason. Interestingly, the person Tomlinson (who is also credited with being the first person to use an @ sign in an email address) sent that boring message to was, erm, himself. Not all internet history is exciting, even for hard-nosed geeks...

5. Ray Tomlinson sent the first email

The real truth depends on how you define email. Some would argue that users of the MAILBOX system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who dropped messages in the directories of other users of the same mainframe computer were the first back in 1965. Tomlinson gets the credit as he was the first to exploit email more as we know it today, in that he found a way in late 1971 of sending messages between interconnected computers across a network (ARPANET) rather than dumb terminals accessing the same computer. By the end of the 1970s, more than 75% of all ARPANET traffic was email! So I guess we can call this myth only half-busted.

6. Google invented internet search

Not even close. The first internet search tool was called Archie (think archive without the v, because that's how it got the name) and was created way back in 1990 by computer science students at McGill University in Montreal. Archie created a searchable database of the downloadable files to be found on anonymous FTP sites in the public domain.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't invent Google until 1997. Inbetween the two there were many other contenders for the search crown, including Gopher in 1991 and soon after Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerised Archives) which did the same thing as Archie but quite a bit better from the user interface perspective, at least as far as text-based systems could.

You have to jump forward to 1993 with Mosaic which enabled graphical browsing of the new-fangled web. Within a year names such as Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, AltaVista and Yahoo had also emerged. Google might be the big name in search today, but it was actually relatively late to the party.

7. Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web as a method of linking pages of information while working at the CERN research labs in Switzerland in 1990. But for all his undoubted genius and vision in inventing the web, Berners-Lee didn’t invent the concept of hyperlinks. For that you have to travel back in time to the early 1960s and a chap called Ted Nelson.

His Project Xanadu was born in 1960 in order to create a simple to use computer network. Although it really failed to get off the ground to any great degree, in 1963 it was Nelson who coined the term 'hypertext' as a method of clicking on a word and being taken elsewhere to more information as a result. Nelson was a true visionary as he saw the web as a library of the world's information almost 30 years before Berners-Lee created it.

8. Netscape Navigator was the first web browser

Netscape Navigator may well be the first web browser many people remember using, but it was beaten out of the traps. The text-only Lynx browser was first off the mark in 1992, followed in 1993 by NCSA Mosaic that was developed by Marc Andreeson who quickly went on to start Netscape.

With the launch of Netscape Navigator in 1994, the popular graphical web browser was really born and accounted for some 90% of all web browser clients in use during the mid-1990s. There were others, notably Cello, which arrived and all but vanished before Microsoft swaggered into the market in 1995, using its sheer clout (and uncompetitive practices) to mop up the market up with Internet Explorer.

9. The 404 error message is named after Room 404 at CERN

The 404 message isn’t the internet equivalent of Room 101. Actually, the 4xx class of error messages relate to problems where the client is thought have gone wrong, and the remainder is just a serial number. So there's a 403 (forbidden - when the server refuses a request) and a 405 (method not allowed - when a request is made but not supported by the resource) to name but a couple.

So what's Room 404 all about? It was a good old fashioned internet hoax that took hold and became something of an urban legend, spread by both those innocently caught up in the lie and those wanted to perpetuate it. The myth suggests, rather incredulously, that room 404 is where Tim Berners-Lee once had his office on the fourth floor at CERN but now sits empty, hence using it as an error code for a web page that no longer exists. Alas, there has never been a room 404 at the CERN labs in Switzerland.

10. Social networking's a new phenomenon

Not by a long chalk. Arguably, the first social networks were the FidoNet Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) that were founded in the mid-1980s and allowed people to 'chat' with other users by dialling up to computers running the FidoNet software. Or how about the Compuserve Information Service from the late 1970s and 1980s? Then there's Prestel MicroNet from the mid-1980s of course. All three systems come very close to what we think of as social networking today.

Perhaps the most worthy contenders for the crown of 'first social network' though should go to The Well, which started in 1985 and had a mainly US audience at the time, or even CIX, which started as a FidoNet system in 1983 and went on to become the foremost forum-driven social-network site in Europe from 1987.

Author: Davey Winder

For more details about purchasing this feature and/or images for editorial usage, please contact Jasmine Samra on pictures@dennis.co.uk

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The ‘myth’ of the invention of the Internet

Nick Schulz| July 23, 2012, 1:02 pm

Gordon Crovitz writes “It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike… by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a ‘world-wide web.’ The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn’t build the Internet.”

The history of the Internet is extremely complicated; a good deal of the Defense Department’s interest in creating a network of networks was to reduce inefficient and costly redundancies in its computer systems. But it’s a mistake to imply that national security concerns such as survivability during a nuclear attack were not important to its creation. Consider this report from DARPA called “A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade.”

Many of the concepts central to the later development of the ARPANET and other computer networks were first described in the series of reports published by RAND in 1964… These ideas include the improved reliability of a distributed network structure over a centralized or star network and over so-called decentralized networks made up of a collection of smaller star network. Extensive studies were undertaken, including simulation of some grid networks, to determine how “survivable” a distributed network could be expected to be after a heavy node and link failures. This study was particularly concerned with the question of keeping a high percentage of the network available and performing well in the face of enemy attacks on the network from the point of view of its suitability for Department of Defense application.

Paul Baran was the lead author of many of those reports. From his bio:

In 1962, a nuclear confrontation seemed imminent. The United States (US) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were embroiled in the Cuban missile crisis. Both the US and the USSR were in the process of building hair-trigger nuclear ballistic missile systems. Each country pondered post-nuclear attack scenarios.
US authorities considered ways to communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. How could any sort of “command and control network” survive? Paul Baran, a researcher at RAND, offered a solution: design a more robust communications network using “redundancy” and “digital” technology.

At the time, naysayers dismissed Baran’s idea as unfeasible. But working with colleagues at RAND, Baran persisted. This effort would eventually become the foundation for the World Wide Web.

And this is from one of Baran’s first papers on the benefits of distributed communications:

This Memorandum briefly reviews the distributed communications network concept and compares it to the hierarchical or more centralized systems. The payoff in terms of survivability for a distributed configuration in the cases of enemy attacks directed against nodes, links, or combinations of nodes and links is demonstrated.