Internet Business

Necessity is the mother of invention, but what could be the necessity for which we needed an invention like the Internet? Faster communication? Yes, apparently it seems that a better and speedier way to communicate might be the reason behind this invention. But when you at the history of internet you will be surprised to know that actual reasons were military-related.

It was 1950s and the Cold War was at its height. The US Department of Defense (DoD) felt a need for a better command-and-control system which could survive even the nuclear war. The military communications were being carried out on public telephone networks at that time. That system was highly vulnerable to destruction in case of an attack. The reason behind such vulnerability was the design of these telephone networks. A telephone network consisted of switching offices each of which were connected to thousands of telephones. These switching offices were then connected to higher-level switching offices, also called toll offices, to form a national hierarchy with only a small amount of redundancy. The vulnerability of system was that the destruction of a few key toll offices could fragment the system into many isolated islands. (Source: Andrew S. Tanenbaum: Computer Networks, London: Prentice-Hall, 2005.)

So, the DoD assigned the task of finding a solution for a better command-and-control system to RAND. One of the employees of RAND, Paul Baran presented a packet-switched network design as a solution. The DoD liked the idea and assigned the task to implement this design to AT&T. The AT&T killed the idea by refusing to build it claiming that is was impossible to built.

Then came the year 1957, when Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite. The US president Eisenhower got fumed at this hit by Soviet Union and tried to found out what was going on in his country’s research centers. He then decided to form a single research organization which was named ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency). ARPA collected country’s brilliant researchers and grad students who were involved in researches at one platform and assigned them the task to find a solution for a better command-and-control system. One of the researchers Wesley Clark came up with an idea of a subnet. His idea was similar to Baran’s design and was bought by ARPA director Larry Roberts. Roberts then awarded the contract to implement this design to BBN, a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. BBN implemented the software and the hardware part of the design and formed what was later called ARPANET. ARPANET was the first form of internet w are using today. So, the internet was developed with a hope that such a network would survive nuclear war.

“The point that I do want to dust off and raise again is that ARPA wouldn’t have happened, if what used to be the Soviet Union hadn’t shaken complacent U.S. awake with a tin can in the sky, Sputnik.

Wars do wonders for the advancement of technology, and the Cold one was certainly no exception. The way to get a technology advanced is to gather a lot of really smart people under one roof and get them to concentrate on a single project. Of course, that takes some organization and money. Where does that come from? But that’s another can of worms – to be opened with relish at a later date. In this case, it was the only body that had a stake in making sure the Net worked – the government.

What with the Cold War in full swing and all, the military, specifically its think tank the Rand Corporation, was concerned that if the war ever got hot and large chunks of the country were vaporized, those phone lines (not to mention considerable segments of the population) would be radioactive dust. And the top brass wouldn’t be able to get in touch and carry on. Thus the packets bouncing from node to node, each of those nodes able to send, receive and pass on data with the same authority as any other. It was anarchy that worked, and on a technical level, it still does, obviously. “
REWIRED by David Hudson,
JOURNAL OF A STRAINED NET,
August 9th, 1996

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But many of the most telling and instructive expressions of the central doctrine as it developed are less well known than they deserve. Nor is it generally remembered today that the decisive struggle between King and Parliament.

Internet resources for special needs educators
iSocial 3D Virtual Learning environment: I’m taking the easy way out here and quoting directly from the web site, “iSocial is a three dimensional virtual learning environment, developed using Sun Microsystem’s Project Wonderland toolkit.

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curve of the computing world Now when you consider this, it is quite amazing to see just how much can be developed within a few months, and the possible combinations of system set ups that can be attributed in the world today.

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