data link Story: Looking Back On Three Decades Of Internet History

Looking Back ... Building a Trail of Interest A Galactic Network
Creating an Electronic Quilt Incalculable Impact

Incalculable Impact

And that is just a fraction of the contributions. No one stands in relation to the Internet as Bell to the telephone or Morse to the telegraph. There was no single moment when it all came together. From the beginning, it was a continuous collaboration of many minds. And any attempt to recite the history in less than a book must be notable for its omissions.

It was not until 1984, when the Net had grown to include 1,000 host computers, that the domain name system was established that lets Amazon.com be Amazon.com and not 208.216.182.15. And in 1991 came the World Wide Web followed by Mosaic, the graphical interface, or browser, that inspired Netscape and Explorer. The number of Internet hosts quickly exceeded a million, and this year that number multiplied fiftyfold.

Before long the barbarians were at the gates. Scientists on the Net were suddenly getting E-mail from journalists, then from their own parents, and then from schoolchildren asking for help with their homework. The Pentagon was sharing the Web with pacifist groups, cyberspace mirroring the conflicts of the physical world.

And what a powerful tool it has become. Simply by typing "Watson, come here" into a search engine, one can now find a scanned image of Bell's original notebook pages at the Library of Congress. There on the yellowed paper, in his own handwriting, is what he really said (slightly different from what's often quoted): "Watson -- come here -- I want to see you."

Sitting up in the futurist's perch, where Licklider put himself almost half a century ago, today's visionaries talk about the arrival in the first decades of the coming millennium of "ubiquitous computing." Hand-held computers will merge with cell phones, talking to computers hidden in the office walls and the trunks of cars, all linked into a pervasive net. With a spoken command, a person will have instant access to the invisible ether of information.

Writing in 1960, Licklider called this kind of technobiological mind meld "man-computer symbiosis" and ventured that bringing it together might take 15 years. "The 15 may be 10 or 500," he added more realistically, "but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind."

As the Internet inevitably recedes into the background, it can almost be taken for granted -- the ultimate compliment. It has become the platform on which its successor will rise. When the 40th anniversary or the 50th rolls around, it will be even harder to untangle the individual contributions to something so much bigger than its inventors.

home

---

data link, October 1999.
data link acknowledges the source of this article, HPCwire, the electronic news magazine for high-performance computing. Used with permission.