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The Internet has changed
much in the two decades since it came into existence. It was conceived in
the era of time-sharing, but has survived into the era of personal computers,
client-server and peer-to-peer computing, and the network computer. It was
designed before LANs existed, but has accommodated that new network technology,
as well as the more recent ATM and frame switched services. It was envisioned
as supporting a range of functions from file sharing and remote login to resource
sharing and collaboration, and has spawned electronic mail and more recently
the World Wide Web. But most important, it started as the creation of a small
band of dedicated researchers, and has grown to be a commercial success with
billions of dollars of annual investment.
One should not conclude
that the Internet has now finished changing. The Internet, although a network
in name and geography, is a creature of the computer, not the traditional
network of the telephone or television industry. It will, indeed it must,
continue to change and evolve at the speed of the computer industry if it
is to remain relevant. It is now changing to provide such new services as
real time transport, in order to support, for example, audio and video streams.
The availability of pervasive networking (i.e., the Internet) along with powerful
affordable computing and communications in portable form (i.e., laptop computers,
two-way pagers, PDAs, cellular phones), is making possible a new paradigm
of nomadic computing and communications.
This evolution will bring
us new applications - Internet telephone and, slightly further out, Internet
television. It is evolving to permit more sophisticated forms of pricing and
cost recovery, a perhaps painful requirement in this commercial world. It
is changing to accommodate yet another generation of underlying network technologies
with different characteristics and requirements, from broadband residential
access to satellites. New modes of access and new forms of service will spawn
new applications, which in turn will drive further evolution of the net itself.
The most pressing question
for the future of the Internet is not how the technology will change, but
how the process of change and evolution itself will be managed. As this paper
describes, the architecture of the Internet has always been driven by a core
group of designers, but the form of that group has changed as the number of
interested parties has grown. With the success of the Internet has come a
proliferation of stakeholders - stakeholders now with an economic as well
as an intellectual investment in the network. We now see, in the debates over
control of the domain name space and the form of the next generation IP addresses,
a struggle to find the next social structure that will guide the Internet
in the future. The form of that structure will be harder to find, given the
large number of concerned stake-holders. At the same time, the industry struggles
to find the economic rationale for the large investment needed for the future
growth, for example to upgrade residential access to a more suitable technology.
If the Internet stumbles, it will not be because we lack for technology, vision,
or motivation. It will be because we cannot set a direction and march collectively
into the future.
Timeline
Footnotes
1
Perhaps this is an exaggeration based on the lead author's residence in Silicon
Valley.
2
On a recent trip to a Tokyo bookstore, one of the authors counted 14 English
language magazines devoted to the Internet.
3
An abbreviated version of this article appears in the 50th anniversary issue
of the CACM, Feb. 97. The authors would like to express their appreciation
to Andy Rosenbloom, CACM Senior Editor, for both instigating the writing of
this article and his invaluable assistance in editing both this and the abbreviated
version.
4
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) changed its name to Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1971, then back to ARPA in 1993, and back
to DARPA in 1996. We refer throughout to DARPA, the current name.
5
It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the
ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war.
This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure
voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did
emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand
losses of large portions of the underlying networks.
6
Including amongst others Vint Cerf, Steve Crocker, and Jon Postel. Joining
them later were David Crocker who was to play an important role in documentation
of electronic mail protocols, and Robert Braden, who developed the first NCP
and then TCP for IBM mainframes and also was to play a long term role in the
ICCB and IAB.
7
This was subsequently published as V. G. Cerf and R. E. Kahn, "A
protocol for packet network interconnection" IEEE Trans. Comm.
Tech., vol. COM-22, V 5, pp. 627-641, May 1974.
8
The desirability of email interchange, however, led to one of the first "Internet
books": !%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing and Networks,
by Frey and Adams, on email address translation and forwarding.
9
Originally named Federal Research Internet Coordinating Committee, FRICC.
The FRICC was originally formed to coordinate U.S. research network activities
in support of the international coordination provided by the CCIRN.
10
The decommisioning of the ARPANET was commemorated on its 20th anniversary
by a UCLA symposium in 1989.
References
P.
Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks", IEEE Trans.
Comm. Systems, March 1964.
V.
G. Cerf and R. E. Kahn, "A protocol for packet network interconnection",
IEEE Trans. Comm. Tech., vol. COM-22, V 5, pp. 627-641, May 1974.
S.
Crocker, RFC001 Host software, Apr-07-1969.
R.
Kahn, Communications Principles for Operating Systems. Internal BBN memorandum,
Jan. 1972.
Proceedings
of the IEEE, Special Issue on Packet Communication Networks, Volume 66,
No. 11, November, 1978. (Guest editor: Robert Kahn, associate guest editors:
Keith Uncapher and Harry van Trees)
L.
Kleinrock, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", RLE Quarterly
Progress Report, July 1961.
L.
Kleinrock, Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay, Mcgraw-Hill
(New York), 1964.
L.
Kleinrock, Queueing Systems: Vol II, Computer Applications, John Wiley
and Sons (New York), 1976
J.C.R.
Licklider & W. Clark, "On-Line Man Computer Communication",
August 1962.
L.
Roberts & T. Merrill, "Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared
Computers", Fall AFIPS Conf., Oct. 1966.
L.
Roberts, "Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication",
ACM Gatlinburg Conf., October 1967.
Authors
Barry
M. Leiner is Director of the Research Institute
for Advanced Computer Science.
Vinton
G. Cerf is Senior Vice President, Internet Architecture and Technology,
at MCI WorldCom.
David
D. Clark is Senior Research Scientist at the MIT
Laboratory for Computer Science.
Robert
E. Kahn is President of the Corporation
for National Research Initiatives.
Leonard
Kleinrock is Professor of Computer Science at the University
of California, Los Angeles, and is Chairman and Founder of Nomadix.
Daniel
C. Lynch is a founder of CyberCash
Inc. and of the Interop networking trade show and conferences.
Jon
Postel served as Director of the Computer Networks Division of the Information
Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California.
Lawrence
G. Roberts is Chairman and CTO of Caspian
Networks
Stephen
Wolff is with Cisco Systems, Inc.
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