"Mommy, where does the internet come from?"

Factual Questions
21

And this is still how the Internet works: IP (Internet Protocol) is a packet-switched, best-effort protocol, meaning that your message is cut into chunks and there are no guarantees which (if any) chunks will get to their destination.

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which is built upon IP, is a reliable protocol, which means your message will arrive where it is supposed to if the network is working at all. It achieves this by resending packets that didn’t make it, so the worst thing the unreliable substrata can do is slow things down.

(Oh, and IP doesn’t say anything about what order your packets will arrive, but TCP guarantees in-order delivery. The TCP implementation has to do a fair bit of reordering, reassembly, and sundry jiggery-pokery to deal with the vagaries of an IP implementation.)

No, it’s a distributed discussion forum. NNTP, the Network News* Transfer Protocol, is a protocol built upon TCP/IP used to implement Usenet. Back in the dark ages, Usenet was implemented using UUCP, the Unix-to-Unix CoPy** (program and protocol), which was a simple store-and-forward protocol adapted to slow, expensive telephone connections between a small number of computers. Essentially, UUCP worked like this: Each machine would batch up that day’s articles and dial up whatever machines it was connected to. It would then look at the the headers of the articles it had and send each article to the machine it mentioned by name. It would also receive articles from those machines and, if those articles were destined for other computers, it would send them along wherever they were headed.

The articles were addressed in a way that reflected this roundabout nature: Imagine an article was going from ‘frodo’ to pavel at ‘kremvax’. Because of the cost of phone lines and long distance, there is no direct line between the two machines. Therefore, the person at frodo has to know which machines his article will have to pass through to reach kremvax, and craft a ‘bang path’ like this one:


frodo!einhorn!randall!jupiter!mars!kremvax!pavel

A bang, in case you haven’t noticed, is an exclamation point. They are used to separate the names of the machines this article will have to pass through to get where it’s going. That is, from frodo it will go to einhorn, then to randall, then to jupiter, then to mars, and finally to its destination at pavel’s account on kremvax. This is as primitive as it gets, folks.

People would give network addresses that looked like this:


...!{topsbar, sally, turing}!foonly!ralph

That means the foonly machine can usually connect to one or more of sally, topsbar, and turing, so you need to find a route to one of them before you can mail ralph.

*(Usenet is commonly called netnews or simply news. This is mildly confusing if you think ‘news’==‘CNN’ or similar.)

**(This name comes from the Unix cp (copy) program, which uucp (the program) resembles to some extent.)

22

Sneaking in here from more jocular pastures to add that a word describing the whole works (intarweb/interweb) seems to be cropping up more and more often. While it’s still a sarcastic term, it seems to be cropping up often enough that it might eventually become a known alternate term – who knows?

For intarweb: Hitting search.msn.com gets me just under 38K hits, and Google gets me 257K hits.

For interweb: MSN gets 384K hits, google gets… wow, 1.8 million hits.

Plus Wikipedia has an entry on “interweb” – make of that what you will. :slight_smile:

23

This seems to be a common idea, but it is incorrect.

The Arpanet was designed to be a means for DARPA-affiliated research instititutions to share resources, to save money and avoid duplication of effort. It was not designed to be a survivable, emergency communications network. The Defense Department had other networks designed for survivable communications.

I think people get confused because there is a lot of overlap in the technologies used in the Arpanet and other government networks. DARPA also funded much of the research into packet switching, routing, congestion control, and other technologies used in military and civilian networks.

The “big idea” of the Internet is something called the catenet, which stands for concatenated networks. It involves building a global internet out of a collection of smaller networks that are connected with gateways. Think of how the postal system works. Each country has its own postal service, but there are standards and procedures that allow letters and parcels to travel from one country to another.

24

I am not disputing your conclusion, just curious - what do you mean by this? Can you elaborate please? Are you simply saying that there will be two groups - a regulated one, and an unregulated one - or is there a deeper implication? Thanks (and sorry to all for the hijack]

25

These news items* betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to “control the Internet.”

ICANN manages the DNS system and I think to some extent the IP addressing space. The link you provided sez:

First, ICANN is not a US Government agency or in any way under direct control of the US Government. It’s true that Commerce originally adminstered DNS (Network Solutions’ original contract was with Commerce) but now ICANN acts autonomously. It does report to Commerce, but Commerce has an express interest in seeing that ICANN moves governance into the private sector. A reading of the pages at the ICANN link given belay the idea that the US unilaterally controls the Internet. (However, ICANN has been criticized in the past for being overly US-centric or Anglo-centric, although I am not up what’s being said today.)

And by the way, although this governance is important to the functioning of the Internet, it is not the Internet. It might seem like I’m splitting hairs here but there is an important distinction. DNS is a layer of abstraction that makes the Internet practical for widespread use but is not essential to its existence.

As far as government control, the US government does not own or control the network interconnections that form the Internet, except to the extent that it regulates telecom carriers in the US. So it might be said that the US government controls or at least has the ability to control the Internet within its own borders but in fact does not exercise control over content. I’m not so sure about the economics, however. Contrast this to China, where the government exercises censorship over content. Now that’s controlling the Internet.

BTW may Jon Postel rest in peace, but with all this I doubt he is.

*And I use the term loosely; the Inquirer piece is merely a fact-free editorial.

26

But it’s such a tired, old, worn out joke. And it is based on bullshit. Gore never said he invented the Internet, what he said was

In fact Al Gore played an important role in making the Internet what it is today.

If **Schnitte **really believes that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, then he is spreading ignorance to a board whose goal is to fight ignorance. More likely he was just throwing out a punchline, but dear god, it’s been done to death.

27

Miller, Philip, TCP/IP Explained, p. 477, Digital Press, Boston, 1997.

28

That’s pretty much all there is to it. Whether Gore actually made this claim or not is something anybody might judge for themselves - Snopes has, as many of us are certainly aware of, the full story.

29

No. This is a matter dealing with facts. Gore never said it. You can’t “judge for yourself” something that is known to be false. There is no judgement to be made here. It never happened.

30

Sorry, El Zagna, but I’d like to contradict you here. Read the Snopes article. Gore did claim to have taken “the initiative in creating the internet” during his terms as Representative and Senator. I’m very well aware that claiming to have taken the initative in the creation of something and claiming to have invented something are two distinctly different things. But the claim he did make is not that much less ridiculous. The internet did not come into existence out of Gore’s initiative. His claim is a hyperbolic campaigning puff, sure. But it is blatantly false, and Gore adorned himself with borrowed plumes.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against Gore - in fact, I guess he was a decent Vice President and would have made a decent President; but the laughter he earned in the internet community about his claims were not that unjustified.

31

New Jersey. Now shut up, I’m driving.

32

Al Gore never said that. That was a lie invented by the Republican propaganda machine.

33

laughter in the internet community?

“the vice president deserves significant credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet.”
and
“Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.” *

These are quotes from Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf – who certainly qualify as fairly prominent people in the internet community! And this doesn’t sound much like “laughter” to me. I think Schnitte is continuing to spout ignorance on this board, instead of fighting it.

*See the whole text here: http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html

34

Maybe you would be kind enough to point out what exactly is wrong with what I said. That Gore claimed to have taken the intitiative in the creation of the internet (albeit, I admit, not to have “invented” it, but regarding the fact that the internet was well within its stage of creation before Gore became Congressman, this claim doesn’t look less vain to me)? He did it. That Gore received laughter for it? He did, maybe not by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, who supported him in this open letter, but by many others. Look around, in websites, magazine articles and newspapers dating back to the time of the 2000 election. There’s plenty of it, and not all of it is Republican propaganda.

35

No; that’s not how it works here.

You made this silly claim in the first place; it’s up to you to provide some cites to back it up.

Others have cited Snopes (“False”) debunking this; I cited Vinton Cerf (‘Father of the Internet’) debunking it.

If you want to continue defending this claim, then you should provide some cites to reputable authorities supporting this claim. You said there were plenty, after all. But don’t suggest that we go looking for 5-year-old newspapers or magazines to support your claim.
P.S. You mention “the time of the 2000 election”. This quote is actually well earlier, a year and a half before that. Most election-time mentions of it are likely to be political propaganda from one side or another, and not very reputable cites.

36

I don’t have much to contribute, other than to say I just found out that, apparently, America is currently seen as trying to keep control over the net.

37

You’ve got to tell me what you want cites for.

Cites for Gore to have claimed the invention of the internet for himself? There is the Snopes article you yourself mention (read it fully, not just the “False” label on top). Gore says he “took the initiative in creating the internet.” Does this equal saying to have “invented” the net? That’s where the “judge for yourself” part comes in. According to my dictionary, “creating” means “causing to exist; make something new or original.” In this sense, Gore can hardly have “created” something that was well in its existence long before he entered the scene. Remember, I’m not denying that Gore does deserve credits for pushing forward the expansion of the net, as Vint Cerf acknowledges. But that’s not the same thing as “taking the initiative in creating the internet,” which is what he claimed.

Or do you want cites that Gore was ridiculed for his statement?

There’s this Time.com notice that introduces him as Al (“Creator of the Internet”) - clearly an ironic sidekick.

There’s this Washington Post article (defending his merits in the development of the web) saying that the statement opened him “up for wide derision.”

There’s this Wired article entitled “The Laugh is on Gore.”

38

OK, Schnitte. Here’s what we’ve got. Gore’s actual quote was, " During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." That’s been thoroughly established.

Now, anyone can take that quote in a vacuum and bicker about what it could mean, but it is also well established that Al Gore was instrumental in making the Internet what it is today. This quote, from Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, is from t-bonham’s link:

This is an unambiguous acknowledgement of Al Gore’s pivotal role in the development of the Internet by the two men generally referred to as “fathers of the Internet”.

If you like, you may continue to laugh at the tired, old Gore-invented-the-Internet joke, but in doing so it seems to me that you are displaying an ignorance of the facts and allowing yourself to be a tool of the Republican smear campaign.