Of Soap and The Internet (2)
The fears of a Russian attack in the 1950s gave rise to the Project Charles proposed by scientists to the Air Force to form a research team to create the technology for defense against aerial attack. They formed Lincohn Laboratory to develope "Distant Early Warning Line "(DEW) as "arays of radars stretching, ideally from Hawaii to Alaska, across the Canadian archipelago to Greenland, Iceland, and the British Isles"** Also the SAGEL (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) project for communication, control, and analysis to aid such "an extended, complex structure of defense."**
SAGE inspired psychologist J. C. R. Licklider, ARPA's director, to view computing in a totally new perspective, and he wrote his paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis" in which he elaborated his idea for the machine as an extended part of the human and his partner in the problem-solving process. When Wesley Clark introduced Licklider to the TX-2 computing machine, the state of the art in digital computation, Licklider was hooked on the vision of a direct interactive between man and computer.
When Paul Banan and Donald Davies independently worked on the idea of the "package switch" system, as an anology of moving companies taking apart a whole structure into manageable parts, moving them across a distance and reassembling them back together at the new site, the idea for the internet began to germinated. Banan came up with the "hot potato routing" a rapid store and forward system working almost instantaneously instead of the old post-it-and-forward teletype procedure.
In 1965, Tom Marill proposed to ARPA to fund his company Computer Corporation of America (CCA) to conduct a networking experiment to connect the TX-2 of Lincohl Company to the SDC Q32 in Santa Monica to enable the two computer to send messges to each other. Marill grouped characters into messages, sent them across the link. He called the set of procedure for sending information back and forth as "protocol".
ARPA's next director Larry Robert wanted to connect all of time-sharing computers to one another directly over dial-up telephone lines; this networking function would be handled by the "host" computers at each site. Wesley Clark proposed to insert a small computer between each host, a subnet work with small, identical nodes, all interconnected as the network transmission lines. The network started with four sites: UCLA, SRI, University of Utah, and University of California at Santa Barbarra. Dave Elan of Utah worked on how to manipulate the network to transmitt more than just textual exchanges.
ARPA awarded the bid to the firm Bolt Benarek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusett to buld the Interface Message Processor (IMP) with Frank Heart the designer and builder. With an invisible subnet, IMPs would work like a telephone line connecting automatically without a human operator.
Such was how the internet technology began.
(Written on January 22, 2007: George Bush's "State Of The Union Address")
