This EDUCAUSE article by Michael Roberts surveys the 25-year history of the Internet from the 1980s and discusses needs for the future. I can still vividly remember doing workshops at Cal Poly University in the 80s when one of the main challenges was teaching instructors how to use e-mail and coping with "bang addresses" that seemed to be a 100 characters long! (Thanks to Infobits for this reference.) ____JH
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"Let’s start by asking: What makes the Internet different from earlier communications systems? First of all, the Internet is based on simple network protocols that assume a smart computer is out at the end of the network. The original design of the Internet reflected the U.S. Department of Defense’s interest in robust communications and in systems that might have some degree of survivability in the event of nuclear war. The network was put into prototype operation in the 1970s and then became the basis of ARPANet in the 1980s. Suddenly, people began to sit up and say, “You know, there are possibilities for doing a lot more with this than we anticipated.”
Another characteristic of the Internet is its interoperability. Unlike massive digital telephone switches, which require precisely engineered components, the Internet has always been able to connect to all kinds of devices at all kinds of bandwidths. That capability continues today, as Internet services are newly delivered via cellphones, iPods, PDAs, and televisions. The interoperability of the protocols allowed Internet traffic to move on top of other communications systems, which permitted millions of home users to connect inexpensively over their analog telephone lines.
The Internet is also very scalable. As late as 1985, the Internet was connecting fewer than 100 hosts; now it is connecting more than 500 million, on the same basic protocols. And the Internet is quite reliable. We assume that our e-mail will get through—and it does—even though there are more than one billion active IP addresses on tens of thousands of federated internets all over the world.
The Internet is a layered system, not a silo system. Earlier communications technology tended to be vertically integrated and based on proprietary designs. That is, the technology would support only the one application that it was designed to support. As a consequence, when new application possibilities came along, new silos had to be erected. The Internet completely reversed that vertical integration. Instead, it is layered horizontally, with much flexibility between the layers and in the layers.
As a result of all these characteristics, the Internet has become a powerful platform for the development of applications. And because of its basic design, it is capable of much personalization for the user. We take it for granted that when we sit down at our machines today, we will have our browser preferences, our e-mail preferences, and our Excel and PowerPoint preferences all right there. The machine feels comfortable to us because we’ve been able to customize and personalize it for ourselves. That’s very uncharacteristic of earlier systems and is one of the main reasons the Internet has spread so broadly and is used so widely."
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