ers) is born “smart” enough to connect
easily with the global network. This is possible because at the core
of this worldwide infrastructure we call the Internet is a set of
shared communication standards, procedures and formats called
protocols. However, when in the early 1970s, the first four-nodes
of the ARPANET became fully functional things were a bit more
complicated. Exchanging data between different computers (let
alone different computer networks) was not as easy as it is today.
Finally, there was a reliable packet-switching network to connect
to, but no universal language to communicate through it. Each
host, in fact, had a set of specific protocols and to login users
were required to know the host’s own ‘language’. Using ARPANET
was like being given a telephone and unlimited credit only to find
out that the only users we can call don’t speak our language.
…
Added by Michael Grove at 22:15 on February 11, 2020
vance
of the first TEST COLOUR TRANSMISSIONS from the BBC • had himself
been offered a job at Goonhilly Down, by GPO Telecommunications,
well before researchers started to investigate packet switching • a
technology that sends a message in portions to its destination
asynchronously without passing it through a centralised mainframe •
but having travelled there by train from where the family were living in
Kentish Town, North London, he was unable to find somewhere for the
family to live locally, and so could not take up the position that he had
been offered. Thankfully not long after, the doctor who was attending
Linnie’s brother Terry, who suffered terribly during the days of the
smog in London, arranged for the family to move to their new home in
Borehamwood. When I started training as an Air Traffic Controller,
cutting my teeth so to speak, on the study of IBM 64K core-store
mainframe systems analysis, as well as all things technologically
related to primary and secondary radar systems, you can just imagine
the conversations that I had with Ron, and not long after I had asked
him for his daughter’s hand in marriage, that a telecommunications
network protocol emerged which constituted the beginnings of the
ARPANET, which by 1981 had grown to 213 nodes. ARPANET
eventually merged with other networks to form the INTERNET
and while Internet development was a focus of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) who published a series of Request for Comment
documents, other networking advancement occurred in industrial
laboratories, such as the local area network (LAN) developments of
Ethernet (1983) and the Token Ring Protocol of 1984.
…
during the last 100 years and particularly with respect to the development of ARPA & ARPANET and the tools which Tim Berners Lee utilised to establish the World Wide Web as ME•WE know and understand [IT] today.
…
algorithm desert ants use to regulate foraging is like the
Traffic Control Protocol (TCP) [updated with correct spelling] used
to regulate data traffic on the internet.
Both ant and human networks use positive feedback: either from
acknowledgements that trigger the transmission of the next data
packet, or from food-laden returning foragers that trigger the exit
of another outgoing forager.
This research led some to marvel at the ingenuity of ants, able to
invent systems familiar to us: wow, ants have been using internet
algorithms for millions of years!
( WIRED, too, flirted with the concept of “anternet”
in its Jargon Watch column last year.)
…