[GreenKeys] Computer Networking History

[Don Robert House]

Computer History Museum  <http://www.computerhistory.org>

1970 -  Computer-to-computer communication 
expanded when the Department of Defense 
established four nodes on the ARPANET: the 
University of California Santa Barbara and UCLA, 
SRI International, and the University of Utah. 
Viewed as a comprehensive resource-sharing 
network, ARPANET´s designers set out with several 
goals: direct use of distributed hardware 
services; direct retrieval from remote, 
one-of-a-kind databases; and the sharing of 
software subroutines and packages not available 
on the users´ primary computer due to 
incompatibility of hardware or languages.

1985 - The modern Internet gained support when 
the National Science foundation formed the 
NSFNET, linking five supercomputer centers at 
Princeton University, Pittsburgh, University of 
California at San Diego, University of Illinois 
at Urbana-Champaign, and Cornell University. 
Soon, several regional networks developed; 
eventually, the government reassigned pieces of 
the ARPANET to the NSFNET. The NSF allowed 
commercial use of the Internet for the first time 
in 1991, and in 1995, it decommissioned the 
backbone, leaving the Internet a self-supporting 
industry.

The NSFNET initially transferred data at 56 
kilobits per second, an improvement on the 
overloaded ARPANET. Traffic continued to 
increase, though, and in 1987, ARPA awarded Merit 
Network Inc., IBM, and MCI a contract to expand 
the Internet by providing access points around 
the country to a network with a bandwidth of 1.5 
megabits per second. In 1992, the network 
upgraded to T-3 lines, which transmit information 
at about 45 megabits per second.

1988 - Robert Morris´ worm flooded the ARPANET. 
Then-23-year-old Morris, the son of a computer 
security expert for the National Security Agency, 
sent a nondestructive worm through the Internet, 
causing problems for about 6,000 of the 60,000 
hosts linked to the network. A researcher at 
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 
California discovered the worm.  "It was like the 
Sorcerer´s Apprentice," Dennis Maxwell, then a 
vice president of SRI, told the Sydney 
(Australia) Sunday Telegraph at the time. Morris 
was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 
hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050.

Morris, who said he was motivated by boredom, 
programmed the worm to reproduce itself and 
computer files and to filter through all the 
networked computers. The size of the reproduced 
files eventually became large enough to fill the 
computers´ memories, disabling them.