PACKET SWITCHING & THE ADVENT OF ARPANET

[Michael Grove]

Leonard Kleinrock's best-known and significant work is his early work on queueing theory, which has applications in many fields, among them as a key mathematical background to message switching as well as to packet switching, which became one of the underlying technologies of the Internet. His initial contribution to this field was his doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, published in book form in 1964; he later published several of the standard works on the subject.

After Lawrence Roberts learned about packet switching in 1967, he sought out Kleinrock who carried out the theoretical work to model the performance of packet-switched networks that underpinned the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet.

[IT] was this concept of packet switching that provided me with the seed of an IDEA of establishing some method of communication over the Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunications Network (AFTN) • between the London ATCC and Brussels ATC • in order to facilitate a more expeditious methodology of Radar Handovers at the Dover VOR.

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[Michael Grove]

  How the Internet was born:
 from the ARPANET to the Internet

     November 2, 2016 11.38pm GMT

   In today’s hyper-tech world, almost any new device (even a fridge,

  let alone phones or computers) 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.

[Michael Grove]

The earliest mention of cloud computing in literature is known to appear in an internal document of Compaq in 1996. In 1997, Professor Ramnath Chellappa from Emory University had mentioned the cloud in an article. Although the term ‘cloud’ was coined, it was a predecessor of cloud computing - known as grid computing - that became popular. Although grids networked compute resources of organisations across the continents, it was still not accessible to non-specialist users or developers.