In the early years of the eighteenth century, Thomas Newcomen devised the first practical engine for pumping water out of a mine. His engine condensed steam to generate power from the weight of the air, relying on the new scientific knowledge developed by Torricelli, Pascal, von Guericke, and others, in the previous century. The science… Continue reading The Pumping Engine
The miners of Renaissance Europe, digging ever deeper into the earth in the search of ore, invariably found another, less welcome substance – water. Everywhere they dug, it found them, seeping into tunnels and shafts. If it could not be removed at least as quickly as it entered, it would flood the mine and make… Continue reading The Weight of the Air
The most striking feature of the engineering quad of my alma mater, Rice University, are the three massive slabs of granite erected on large plinths at its center, each canted at a different angle: 45, 90, and 180 degrees. Less remarked upon, but more significant to my young, impressionable, and romantic mind, was another sculpture,… Continue reading The Age of Steam: Introduction
And so we reach the conclusion of “The Backbone,” my story of the origins of the Internet1. We have seen the basic arc of the Internet’s development from the 1960s to the 1990s - nurtured in its youth by the government, given room to grow to fruition by the unravelling of the power of the… Continue reading The Backbone: Conclusion
In the summer of 1986, Senator Al Gore, Jr., of Tennessee introduced an amendment to the Congressional Act that authorized the budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF). He called for the federal government to study the possibilities for “communications networks for supercomputers at universities and Federal research facilities.” To explain the purpose of this… Continue reading Internet Ascendant, Part 2: Going Private and Going Public
In 1990, John Quarterman, a networking consultant and UNIX expert, published a comprehensive survey of the state of computer networks. In a brief section on the potential future for computing, he predicted the appearance of a single global network for "electronic mail, conferencing, file transfer, and remote login, just as there is now one worldwide… Continue reading Internet Ascendant, Part 1: Exponential Growth
Between roughly 1975 and 1995, access to computers accelerated much more quickly than access to computer networks. First in the United States, and then in other wealthy countries, computers became commonplace in the homes of the affluent, and nearly ubiquitous in institutions of higher education. But if users of those computers wanted to connect their… Continue reading The Era of Fragmentation, Part 4: The Anarchists
In the spring of 1981, after several smaller trials, The French telecommunications administration (Direction générale des Télécommunications, or DGT), began a large-scale videotex experiment in a region of Brittany called Ille-et-Vilaine, named after its two main rivers. This was the prelude to the full launch of the system across l'Hexagone in the following year. The… Continue reading The Era of Fragmentation, Part 3: The Statists
On May 9, 1961, Newton Minow, newly-appointed chairman of the FCC, gave the first speech of his tenure. He spoke before the National Association of Broadcasters, a trade industry group founded in the 1920s to forward the interests of commercial radio, an organization dominated in Minow's time by the big three of ABC, CBS, and… Continue reading The Era of Fragmentation, Part 2: Sowing the Wasteland
By the early 1980s, the roots of what we know now as the Internet had been established - its basic protocols designed and battle-tested in real use - but it remained a closed system almost entirely under the control of a single entity, the U.S. Department of Defense. Soon that would change, as it expanded… Continue reading The Era of Fragmentation, Part 1: Load Factor
This post is the first in a probable series of 'tangents', not part of a continuing series like The Switch or The Backbone. In fact, this particular tangent veers well off of this blog's normal subject matter, as it deals primarily with fantasy role-playing games. The Magic of Dungeons and Dragons Since I was a… Continue reading Tangent: The Automated Dungeon Master
In their 1968 paper, "The Computer as a Communications Device," written while the ARPANET was still in development, J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor claimed that the linking of computers would not stop with individual networks. Such networks, they predicted, would merge into a "labile network of networks" that would bind a variety of "information processing… Continue reading Inter-Networking
Over the first half of the 1970s, the ecology of computer networking diversified from its original ARPANET ancestry along several dimensions. ARPANET users discovered a new application, electronic mail, which became the dominant activity on the network. Entrepreneurs spun-off their own ARPANET variants to serve commercial customers. And researchers from Hawaii to l'Hexagone developed new… Continue reading The Computer as a Communication Device
With ARPANET, Robert Taylor and Larry Roberts intended to connect many different research institutions, each hosting its own computer, for whose hardware and software it was wholly responsible. The hardware and software of the network itself, however, lay in a nebulous middle realm, belonging to no particular site. Over the course of the years 1967-1968,… Continue reading ARPANET, Part 3: The Subnet
By the end of 1966, Robert Taylor, had set in motion a project to interlink the many computers funded by ARPA, a project inspired by the "intergalactic network" vision of J.C.R. Licklider. Taylor put the responsibility for executing that project into the capable hands of Larry Roberts. Over the following year, Roberts made several crucial… Continue reading ARPANET, Part 2: The Packet
By the mid-1960s, the first time-sharing systems had already recapitulated the early history of the first telephone exchanges. Entrepreneurs built those exchanges as a means to allow subscribers to summon services such as a taxi, a doctor, or the fire brigade. But those subscribers soon found their local exchange just as useful for communicating and… Continue reading ARPANET, Part 1: The Inception
After authorizing private microwave networks in the Above 890 decision, the FCC might have hoped that they could leave those networks penned in their quiet little corner of the market and forget about them. But this quickly proved impossible. New challengers continued to press against the existent regulatory framework. They proposed a variety of new ways to… Continue reading The Unraveling, Part 2
In the early 1960s, interactive computing began to spread out from the few tender saplings nurtured at Lincoln Lab and MIT - spread in two different senses. First, the computers themselves sprouted tendrils, that reached out across buildings, campuses, and towns to allow users to interact at a distance, and to allow many users to… Continue reading Extending Interactivity
The very first electronic computers were idiosyncratic, one-off research installations.1 But as they entered the marketplace, organizations very quickly assimilated them into a pre-existing culture of data-processing - one in which all data and processes were represented as stacks of punched cards. Herman Hollerith developed the first tabulator capable of reading and counting data based… Continue reading Discovering Interactivity
For some seventy years, AT&T, parent company of the Bell System, was all but unrivaled in domestic American telecommunications. For most of that time, General Telephone, later known as GT&E and then simply GTE, was AT&T's only rival of any significance. Yet it accounted for a mere two million telephone lines at mid-century, less than… Continue reading The Unraveling, Part 1
