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Happy (Symbolic) Birthday, Internet!

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RFC (Request for Comments) 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker from the University of California, Los Angeles, and published on April 7, 1969. This RFC was typewritten and circulated on hard copy among the ARPA (the Department of Defence's Advanced Research Projects Agency) researchers, and by December 1969 ARPANET was fully functional. After ARPANET had been up and running for a decade, ARPA looked for another agency to hand off the network to. After all, ARPA's primary business was funding cutting-edge research and development, not running a communications utility. Eventually the network was turned over to the Defense Communications Agency, also part of the Department of Defense.

In 1983, TCP/IP protocols replaced the earlier NCP protocol as the principal protocol of the ARPANET; in 1984, the U.S. military portion of the ARPANet was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET. At the same time, Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel were working on what would become the Domain Name System.

The early Internet, based around the ARPANET, was government-funded and therefore restricted to non-commercial uses such as research; unrelated commercial use was strictly forbidden. This initially restricted connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects, or providing services to those who were.

Another branch of the U.S. government, the National Science Foundation, became heavily involved in Internet research in the mid-1980s. The NSFNet backbone, intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF, was established in 1986.

At the end of the 1980s, the U.S. Department of Defense decided the network was developed enough for its initial purposes, and decided to stop further funding of the core Internet backbone. The ARPANET was gradually shut down (its last node was turned off in 1989), and NSF, a civilian agency, took over responsibility for providing long-haul connectivity in the U.S.

In another NSF initiative, regional TCP/IP-based networks such as NYSERNet (New York State Education and Research Network) and BARRNet (Bay Area Regional Research Network), grew up and started interconnecting with the nascent Internet. This greatly expanded the reach of the rapidly growing network, but what to do with this network? As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realized the growing need to be able to find and organize files and related information. Projects such as Gopher, WAIS, and the Anonymous FTP Archive Site list attempted to create schemes to organize distributed data and present it to people in an easy-to-use form. Unfortunately, these projects fell short in being able to accommodate all the various existing file and data types, and in being able to grow without centralized bottlenecks. Then came Hypertext. The technology's creation had been inspired by Vannevar Bush's "memex" and developed through Ted Nelson's research on Project Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart's research on NLS. Many small self-contained hypertext systems had been created before, such as Apple Computer's HyperCard, but before the Internet, nobody had worked out how to scale up the technology so that it could to refer to another document anywhere in the world. The actual solution was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, out of sheer exasperation after he kept raising his idea at conferences and no one in the Internet or hypertext communities would implement it for him. He was a computer programmer working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, and wanted a way for physicists to share information about their research. His documentation project was the source of the two key inventions that made the World Wide Web possible.

On April 30, 1995 the NSF privatized access to the network they had created. It was at this point that the growth of the Internet really took off. Combining the Client/Host structure first suggested by the Publication of RFC 1 with the TCP/IP networking protocol & the data delivery & layout abilities of HTTP/HTML, the modern Internet has done much to change the lives of the Nerds, Geeks & Wonks that reside in her comforting embrace.

Other Historical Highlights for Today:

  • Araw ng Kagitingan - The Philipines Day of Valor, it celebrates the bravery of the men & women who stood against the Japanese at Corrigidor & Bataan. Moved this year from April 9th to today for a long weekend (It's already Friday in the Philipines).
  • 1614 - El Greco (Domenikos Theotocopoulos), artist, died (b. 1541)
  • 1739 - Dick Turpin, highwayman, hanged (b. 1706)
  • 1761 - Thomas Bayes mathematician, died (b. 1702)
  • 1795 - France adopts the metre as the unit of length. Originally defined as "1/10,000,000 of the distance from the pole to the equator" (which was wrong), in 1960 it was redefined as "1650763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the krypton-86 atom," & currently is defined as "Length traveled by light in vacuum during 1/299792458 of a second."
  • 1856 - Foundation of Nelson College, Nelson, New Zealand
  • 1871 - Alexander Lloyd, mayor of Chicago, IL, died (b. 1805)
  • 1891 - P. T. Barnum, circus impresario, Humbug, died (b. 1810)
  • 1906 - Mount Vesuvius erupts and devastates Naples. This was part of the reason my Great-Grandparents (Mother's Mother's Parents) left for New York.
  • 1927 - First long distance public television broadcast (Washington, DC to New York City; image was of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover).
  • 1943 - WooHoo! First synthesis of LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, by Dr. Albert Hoffman. He took a little & rode his bicycle home really fast, man!
  • 1945 - World War II: The Japanese battleship Yamato is sunk 200 miles north of Okinawa while in-route to a suicide mission. Does that mean she succeeded or failed? The ship was resurected in the Japanese anime Space Battleship Yamato, and is also the name of one of the USS Enterprise's sister ships.
  • 1947 - Henry Ford, automobile manufacturer and industrialist, died (b. 1863)
  • 1950 - Walter Huston, Academy Award winning actor, Father & Grandfather to Academy Award winnning Actors, died (b. 1884)
  • 1955 - Theda Bara, silent film actress, died (b. 1885)
  • 1964 - IBM announces the System/360.
  • 1803 - James Curtiss, mayor of Chicago, IL, is Born (d. 1859)
  • 1891 - Ole Kirk Christiansen, in Denmark, inventor of Lego, is Born (d. 1958)
  • 1897 - Walter Winchell, broadcaster, journalist, is Born (d. 1972)
  • 1908 - Percy Faith, composer, musician, leader of the Percy Faith Orchestra, is Born (d. 1976)
  • 1915 - Billie Holiday, American jazz and Blues singer, is Born (d. 1959)
  • 1915 - Henry Kuttner, science fiction writer & editor, is Born (d. 1958)
  • 1920 - Ravi Shankar, musician
  • 1922 - Mongo Santamaria, Latin jazz musician, is Born. He's the payoff in a throwaway joke in Blazing Saddles that I just finally got this past year: When the character Mongo enters Rock Ridge, a Mexican stereotype does a double take & gibbers "Mongo! Santa Maria!" (d. 2003)
  • 1929 - Bob Denard, French mercenary, is Born. He's overthrown the Indian Ocean nation of Comoros 4 times.
  • 1949 - John Oates, musician, is Born ("Hall and Oates")
  • 1951 - Janis Ian, singer and songwriter, is Born.
  • 1954 - Jackie Chan, actor, is Born
D

Oops Freddie! That isn't an image of Theda Bara. That's one of my all time favorite pictures. Actually it's Marilyn Monroe posing as Theda Bara taken by Richard Avedon. Such a great picture.

Will the real Theda Bara please stand up :D

[ Edited by: DawnTiki on 2005-04-07 08:55 ]

You mean the Internet WASN'T invented by Al Gore?! I'm crushed!

Next you're going to tell me Nixon did know about Watergate!!

S

Probably a can of worms, but poor Mr. Gore has taken a lot of flak for the comment he made. I think it came about because he was involved in freeing up the military lines for civilian use or something. Hence he was at least involved in the creation of the internet as we know it. Does anyone know the real story?

On 2005-04-07 08:29, DawnTiki wrote:
Oops Freddie! That isn't an image of Theda Bara. That's one of my all time favorite pictures. Actually it's Marilyn Monroe posing as Theda Bara taken by Richard Avedon. Such a great picture.

Will the real Theda Bara please stand up :D

[ Edited by: DawnTiki on 2005-04-07 08:55 ]

Oops, you're right! It's still my favorite "Theda Barda" picture, though.

M

Little know fact:

During Hall & Oates' "sabbatical", John had a short unfruitful singing/martial arts career with Jackie.

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