Internet and World Wide Web

 Last update: 2005/03/08

Today the words "Internet" and "World Wide Web" have become part of everyday vocabulary. So it is understandable that many people, with grounds or without, claim to have had a role in their development. I firmly claim to have had no role in the development of either. At the time I started MPEG, and for many years afterwards, I had limited knowledge of what was happening in the Internet environment even though for many years I had been a good user of some of their products, namely File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and electronic mail. 

So there would be ground for a reader to ask why this page should even appear. One answer is that the Internet is an interesting and paradigmatic success story there is much to learn from. It is a good example of how outstanding results can be produced when - as it happened for the Internet - PAs invest in R&D targeted for the appropriate time frame, with measurable concrete benefits for the funding authority, and the funding measures are complemented by proper links between industry and the environment carrying out the research. 

The Internet project started from technological roots, then it created an industry capable of producing the infrastructure pieces needed by the project and then actually deployed the network. With a network up and running a broad community of users was established that used the network to continue the collaborative development of the specifications and at the same time field trialed it. The growing size of the infrastructure being deployed required operation and management and a form of "standardisation" (if the people involved in that venture will accept this term), the latter also taking care of the constant evolution of the technology. Lastly, the project is remarkable because it yielded an effective transition from R&D into a commercially exploitable venture that has provided considerable benefits to the country that initiated and, for all practical purposes, managed its operational aspects. 

The second answer is that, a posteriori, it turns out that there are striking similarities between many of the ideas that have guided the development of the Internet and of MPEG. There are also differences, some superficial, some more deep-rooted. The third, and quite relevant, answer is that the Internet is going to play an increasingly important role and the interactions with MPEG, started a few years ago, will probably continue for some time. 

The following is a brief account of the history of the Internet and of the World Wide Web assembled from publicly available information. I have tried to filter out the inevitable lore that has sprouted from a venture of such an impact on people's imagination, and I apologise for any error that knowledgeable readers will find in this page. This may have been caused either by the inaccuracy of my sources or my misreading of them or my excessive filtering or all the three causes together. 

One of the things the US government did in 1957 when it discovered how the USA had been left behind in the race to space seeing how the USSR had been the first to launch around the Earth their man-made satellites called Sputniks, was to form the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an agency of the Department of Defence (DoD), with the purpose of establishing a US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.

Electronic computing was an obvious target for ARPA research projects. Some of the first projects were about war game scenarios, timesharing,  computer languages and computer graphics. A good deal of the progress made in the 3D CG domain, as reported before, was the result of these projects. The idea of linking computers via the network came in the second half of the 1960s. Basic technologies for such an endeavour were a protocol enabling computers to communicate between themselves and the intelligence for other computers (called "hosts") to route packets of data using a packet switching technique. Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the name given to these special hosts making up the "ARPANET" computer network. The first IMPs were installed in 1969 at four universities across the USA and more were added the following year. They were linked by "high speed" lines of 56 kbit/s to the site of the manufacturer Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). The typical use of the network was remote login (Telnet), i.e. the use of computing resources via remote terminals. The first IMPs could only support a maximum of four terminals at a time, but in 1971 a new IMP was developed that could hold up to 63 terminals simultaneously. 

In December 1970, the first ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP), was completed and it became possible to develop application protocols on top of it. So FTP and electronic mail followed NCP soon after. Electronic mail included such functionalities as listing, selecting, reading, filing, forwarding, and responding to messages. The NCP relied on the ARPANET to provide end-to-end flow control, i.e. a set of services including packet reordering and lost packet recovery. Other networks, however, such as SATNET (satellite networking) and packet radio, did not provide such functions. 

In 1971 work was started on the idea of connecting different networks. The result of the development that followed was the Transmission-Control Protocol (TCP). In July 1977 a demonstration was made of how data could be moved on ARPANET, SATNET and the packet radio network, using TCP. Data was sent from San Francisco to London and back to California travelling 150,000 km without losing a bit. The name Internet comes from the idea of a protocol capable of overcoming the barriers between different networks.

In 1978 TCP was split into two separate functions: TCP performing the function of breaking up the datagrams and reassembling them at the destination, executing flow control and recovering from lost packets, and IP performing the addressing and forwarding of individual packets. This functionality split, an obvious one after the rationalisation made by OSI, was necessary because computer-to-computer communication required flow control and packet-loss recovery, while in real-time communication, such as in human-to-human voice communication, a packet loss was preferable to waiting for a long time. 

The requirements of the two communication forms that utilise the same packet-based data communication technology signal another difference. Computer-oriented data communication is designed to provide errorless transmissions, no matter how long it may take, because in general computers do not know how to deal with errors. Human-oriented communication is designed to be fast but does not guarantee errorless transmission, because humans hate to wait but have some capability of making up for missing or damaged information. Therefore the machines that are used by humans to communicate are designed to compensate errors. Indeed, one of the major differentiating factors between different MPEG-2 decoders is the different ability to recover transmission erros minimising their visual and audio effects. 

The official birth date of the Internet can be taken to be the 1st of January 1983, when ARPANET changed over to the new protocol. In the meantime, use of the network was growing and required some sort of governance. In 1979 ARPA established the Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB), replaced in 1983 by the Internet Activities Board (IAB). Under the IAB several Task Forces were created, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) being the one managing the technical evolution of the Internet.  Later, WGs were combined into Areas under the responsibility of Area Directors. The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) is composed of the Area Directors. Today some 70 WGs are active in the IETF. 

The Internet Society was established in 1991, under the auspices of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) of Bob Kahn and the leadership of Vinton Cerf, both major contributors to the early developments of the Internet. In 1992, the Internet Activities Board became the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) operating under the auspices of the Internet Society. 

ARPANET and then the Internet set up a huge infrastructure based on sophisticated technologies. Free and open access to the basic documents, especially the specifications of the protocols, was a basic feature of the process. Since the beginnings of the Internet were rooted in the university and research community, the academic tradition of open publication of ideas and results helped make them widely accessible. That was still too slow for a dynamic exchange of ideas and the establishment of the Request for Comments (RFC) series of notes in 1969 was a great innovation. RFCs were memos intended to be an informal and fast distribution way to share ideas with other researchers. The first RFCs were printed on paper and distributed via snail mail, but when FTP came into use, RFCs were made available for online access via FTP and so enabled a rapid cross-fertilisation of ideas: ideas in one RFC triggered more RFCs building on the old RFC. When consensus was achieved, a specification document would be prepared and would then be used for implementations. 

To be able to send data to a host, an identification method was required. This was done using four 8-bit numbers that can go from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. As the Internet continued to grow, however, it became convenient to replace numeric addresses with names expressed by characters so that users could type either the numbers or the name. This required all hosts to keep a table of all the other hosts with their associated names and addresses. The management of tables of addresses distributed on all computers was feasible only as long as the number of hosts was limited, but with the shift to a large number of independent networks, such as Local Area Networks (LAN), having all hosts with the complete table became rapidly unfeasible. 

In 1984 the Domain Name System (DNS) was developed. The purpose of DNSs is to translate the domain name expressed in characters, e.g. chiariglione.org, into an IP number. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) oversees the distribution of unique numeric IP addresses and domain names and is responsible for managing and coordinating the DNS to ensure that translation of a name into its IP address, also called "universal resolvability", is correctly done. 

The DNS is based on 13 special computers distributed around the world, called root servers, coordinated by ICANN. These contain the same information, so that it is possible to spread the workload and back each other up. The root servers contain the IP addresses of all the Top Level Domain (TLD) registries - i.e. the global registries such as .com, .org, etc. and the 244 country-specific registries such as .it (Italy), .br (Brazil), etc. In addition to these, there are thousands of computers - called Domain Name Resolvers (DNR) - that constantly download and copy the information contained in the root servers. 

In 1985, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched a program to establish Internet access across the USA. The backbone was called NSFNET and was open to all educational facilities, academic researchers, government agencies, and international research organizations (CSELT being one of them). As early as 1974 Telenet, a commercial version of ARPANET, had already opened and in 1990 world.std.com became the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access. Around 1993, Network Solutions took over the job of registering .com domain names. 

So in 1989 DARPA, the new name that ARPA took when it got a "Defense" at the beginning of its name, finally decided to pull the plug on the 22-year old network. On that occasion, Danny Cohen, another Internet pioneer, said in a speech: 

"In the beginning ARPA created the ARPAnet. 
"And the ARPAnet was without form and void. 
"And darkness was upon the deep. 
"And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network and ARPA said, 'Let there be a protocol,' and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good. 
"And ARPA said, 'Let there be more protocols,' and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good. 
"And ARPA said, 'Let there be more networks,' and it was so." 

I cannot help making comments on this speech. The part: 

And ARPA said, 'Let there be more protocols,' and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good

would become in MPEG: 

And MPEG said, 'Let there be more protocols, for new functionalities, and it was so. And MPEG saw that it was good. 

Maybe Danny Cohen meant to say that, but I would not swear he did and the answer can be yes or no depending on some subtleties. Indeed, the practice of the Internet world is one of giving "citizen rights", i.e. "standard status", to any new idea that has passed peer review. This is an implementation of a Darwinian process applied to ideas, but the survival of an idea depends on people implementing it and using it. Isn't this great?

Depending on the goal one wants to achieve, this may be a good or a bad idea. If continuous progress, such as in an academic environment, is the goal, it is a good idea because one embeds the seeds of evolution in the system. New ideas improve the old ones and the system becomes better and better. If the seamless use of the infrastructure is the goal, it is a bad idea because users interested in a service are forced to become experimenters and struggle continuously with instability and disruption in communication. This attitude of the Internet world is a direct consequence of the original closed environment of experts building the foundations of the Internet as a day-by-day job. It is not necessarily ideal when there are (hundreds of) million users who want the system up and running for their own needs and they could not care less about the technicalities of the system or of another technical improvement. 

Instead, the MPEG approach is one of "managed evolution". Standards are created to solve a communication need using the state of technology at a given time. When progress of technology provides a meaningful quantum step, as assessed by MPEG participants, and therefore without affecting the million users, a new standard is produced and, if possible, a migration path from the old to the new standard is created.

Continuing my comments on this speech, I would add that, about networks, MPEG has no opinion. As much as there are many roads, rails etc., it is fine if there are many networks. I would even go one step further and say that there could be many transport protocols each designed for a particular goal.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, then a physicist working at the Centre Européen pour l'Énergie Nucléaire (CERN) in Geneva, wrote a document entitled "Information Management: A Proposal". The following year the proposal was approved and he started work on a program that would allow linking and browsing text documents. The program and the project were called WorldWideWeb (WWW). The following year a line mode browser was developed and WWW was released on machines within CERN. By 1992, there were already 26 reasonably reliable servers that contained hyperlinked documents. The major technical enablers of the work were the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the information representation part (in the MPEG lingo an example would be MPEG-2 Video) and HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP), the information transport part (in the MPEG lingo a corresponding example would be MPEG-2 TS).

In 1993 Marc Andreesen and others employees of National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) in the USA created Mosaic, the first user friendly, "clickable" Internet browser. Marc Andreesen and his team gave away the browser free for trial to increase the publicity of Mosaic. In 1994 Marc left NCSA to start his own company which he first called Mosaic Communications Corp and later Netscape Communication Corporation. The success of the Netscape browser was immediate and in March 1995 WWW traffic surpassed ftp traffic. In 1997 the threshold of 1 million WWW servers was crossed. 

The immediate success of the WWW triggered the establishment in 1994 of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. CERN discontinued support of these non-core activities and transferred them to the Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA) in France. Later a W3C centre was hosted at Keio University in Japan. In recent years W3C has become a major SDO producing Information Technology standards. 

In the last few years, the World Wide Web took the shape of a globally interconnected network of hypermedia information represented in a standard form (HTML), using the Internet for the transport of information (HTTP), employing a uniform addressing scheme for locating resources on the Web called Universal Resource Locator (URL), a set of protocols for accessing named resources over the Web and a growing number of servers that respond to requests from browsers (or clients) for documents stored on those servers. 

The success of the Internet brought a wind of change in the sleeping telecom and old IT worlds. The hype of computer and telecommunication convergence of the early 1980s had prompted the launch of the ambitious OSI project with strong official support on the part of telecommunication operators, major computer vendors and even governments. By the time the use of the Internet and of the WWW was expanding like wildfire, the OSI project had already been going on for 15 years, but the actual implementation in products was still lacking. When products existed, they were available only on large computer installations, while the Internet protocol suite was available on most PCs. 

In a matter of months the already dwindling support for OSI collapsed. In retrospect, it is clear that the idea to develop a standard allowing a computer of any make (and in the early 1980s there were tens and tens of computers of different makes) to connect to any kind of network, talk to a computer of any make, execute applications on the other computer, etc., no matter how intellectually challenging and fascinating it was, had very little prospect of success, particularly because this would have forced the opening up of proprietary systems that IT vendors had no intention of doing. 

A similar, although not as dramatic, fate was awaiting the other major telco standardisation project. ATM standardisation had begun in the mid-1980s and had produced several ITU-T recommendations, but in the early 1990s industry was still not making products. Sun Microsystems took the lead and promoted the establishment of a new body called ATM Forum. This had the advantage of having a much wider industry representation and was driven by a much more pragmatic approach to standardisation that aimed at facilitating development of standards-based products. The ATM Forum used to boast that their first specification was developed in just 4 months without any new technical work, just by removing many of the options from existing ITU-T recommendations. Once the option-heavy ITU-T documents that the manufacturing industry, without the backing of fat orders from the telcos, had not dared to implement, became the slim ATM Forum specifications, ATM products became commercially available at the initiative of manufacturers, at interesting prices, in a matter of months. 

This was not enough to save ATM, though. The volumes that the booming internet infrastructure could command were such that costly ATM equipment was not competitive. This was one of the causes for the eventual discontinuation of telcos plans to deploy VoD services, which were designed to be based on ATM. Today ATM is confined to a low layer on top of which IP is used. 

As for all things allowed to have a life of their own, the Internet boom has created other problems for the manufacturing industry, but that is another story.

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