History Of The Internet

Internet pre-History:

Ancient Roads of Telecommunications & Computers

by Gregory Gromov

Introduction

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The Internet is a global network that consist of hundreds millions of computers around the world. All of them can be connected (two ways communicate) with each other. Up to now more then half of the American households were connected to the Internet.

People pay their bills; book airline tickets and hotel rooms; rent, sell and buy homes, cars, ... and do a lot more online. Almost all businesses and totally every government branches of the Fed, states and local levels do have opportunity to communicate online.

By this way our society becomes incomparable more dynamic, rises it's productivity and ... becomes more vulnerable one as well.

Cyber-war is not just one of the most exciting themes of science-fiction novels any more. Government, businesses and a great part of population of the developed countries appeared too depend from the Internet now. For instance a couple of years ago the total damage to national economy from network intrusion's attacks exceeded the bank robberies ones and still continues to grow.

Significant part of the national leading library resources is reachable online, the colleges propose online courses, search-engines provides answer to almost any questions. At the same time porno-show industry became one of the fastest growing source of the online revenue. This industry generated Internet content that creates healthy fear of parents. Different types and political profiles extremists groups around the world launch to the Internet thousands of hate sites every next day.

In other words the virtual Net-world that was born just a couple of years ago on the border between two milleniums creates tremendous new opportunities and almost the same scale of unpredictable fears.

All these events happened so fast that people outside IT professional community mostly was not able to understand where this new online technology comes from and what is the scientific basement of the virtual world.

Internet itself by definition was born on the crossroad of the of computer and telecommunication industries. Let us try to take a brief look on the history of the roads that finally brought us to this fruitful crossroads.

Computers

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History of computers began many thousands years ago. The first of the archeologically well enough proven sources about artificial tool for calculations was so called abacus. The abacus emerged about 5,000 years ago in Asia Minor and is still in use in some countries today. This device allows users to make computations using a system of sliding beads arranged on a rack. Early merchants used the abacus to keep trading transactions.

There were lots of the different mechanically realizations versions of the abacus basic idea in different geographically areas then. But the next significant steps on this road were done just during last 500 years in Europe.

In 1642, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the 18-year-old son of a French tax collector, invented what he called a numerical wheel calculator to help his father with his duties. This brass rectangular box, also called a Pascaline, used eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long. Pascal's device used a base of ten to accomplish this.

In 1694, a German mathematician and philosopher, Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz (1646-1716), improved the Pascaline by creating a that could also multiply.

The real beginnings of computers as we know them today, however, lay with an English mathematics professor, Charles Babbage (1791-1871). In 1822 he proposed a machine to perform differential equations, called a Difference Engine. Powered by steam and large as a locomotive, the machine would have a stored program and could perform calculations and print the results automatically. After working on the Difference Engine for 10 years, Babbage was suddenly inspired to begin work on the first general-purpose computer, which he called the Analytical Engine.

Babbage's assistant, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1842) and daughter of English poet Lord Byron, was instrumental in the machine's design. One of the few people who understood the Engine's design as well Babbage, she helped revise plans, secure funding from the British government, and communicate the specifics of the Analytical Engine to the public. Also, Lady Lovelace's fine understanding of the machine allowed her to create the instruction routines to be fed into the computer, making her the first female computer programmer.

The first really large scale practically implementation of the computer was done by an American inventor, Herman Hollerith (1860-1929). His task was to find a faster way to compute the U.S. census. The previous census in 1880 had taken nearly seven years to count and with an expanding population, the bureau feared it would take 10 years to count the latest census. Unlike Babbage's idea of using perforated cards to instruct the machine, Hollerith's method used cards to store data information which he fed into a machine that compiled the results

mechanically. Each punch on a card represented one number, and combinations of two punches represented one letter. As many as 80 variables could be stored on a single card.

Instead of ten years, census takers compiled their results in just six weeks with Hollerith's

machine. In addition to their speed, the punch cards served as a storage method for data and they helped reduce computational errors.

Hollerith brought his punch card reader into the business world, founding Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, later to become International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924 after a series of mergers. Up to now IBM still keeps the #1 position in the computer business worldwide.

Other companies such as Remington Rand and Burroghs also manufactured punch readers for business use. Both business and government used punch cards for data processing until the 1960's.

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) developed a calculator for solving differential equations in 1931. The machine could solve