"A Brief History of the Internet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

network were to be high-speed supercomputers (or what passed for supercomputers
at the time). These were rare and valuable machines which were in real need of
good solid networking, for the sake of national research-and-development
projects.

In fall 1969, the first such node was installed in UCLA. By December 1969, there
were four nodes on the infant network, which was named ARPANET, after its
Pentagon sponsor.

The four computers could transfer data on dedicated high- speed transmission
lines. They could even be programmed remotely from the other nodes. Thanks to
ARPANET, scientists and researchers could share one another's computer
facilities by long-distance. This was a very handy service, for computer-time
was precious in the early '70s. In 1971 there were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by
1972, thirty-seven nodes. And it was good.

By the second year of operation, however, an odd fact became clear. ARPANET's
users had warped the computer-sharing network into a dedicated, high-speed,
federally subsidized electronic post- office. The main traffic on ARPANET was
not long-distance computing. Instead, it was news and personal messages.
Researchers were using ARPANET to collaborate on projects, to trade notes on
work, and eventually, to downright gossip and schmooze. People had their own
personal user accounts on the ARPANET computers, and their own personal
addresses for electronic mail. Not only were they using ARPANET for person-to-
person communication, but they were very enthusiastic about this particular
service -- far more enthusiastic than they were about long-distance computation.

It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an ARPANET broadcasting
technique in which an identical message could be sent automatically to large
numbers of network subscribers. Interestingly, one of the first really big
mailing-lists was "SF- LOVERS," for science fiction fans. Discussing science
fiction on the network was not work-related and was frowned upon by many ARPANET
computer administrators, but this didn't stop it from happening.

Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew. Its decentralized structure made
expansion easy. Unlike standard corporate computer networks, the ARPA network
could accommodate many different kinds of machine. As long as individual
machines could speak the packet-switching lingua franca of the new, anarchic
network, their brand-names, and their content, and even their ownership, were
irrelevant.

The ARPA's original standard for communication was known as NCP, "Network
Control Protocol," but as time passed and the technique advanced, NCP was
superceded by a higher-level, more sophisticated standard known as TCP/IP. TCP,
or "Transmission Control Protocol," converts messages into streams of packets at
the source, then reassembles them back into messages at the destination. IP, or
"Internet Protocol," handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets are
routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks with multiple
standards -- not only ARPA's pioneering NCP standard, but others like Ethernet,
FDDI, and X.25.