The Internet - A Case Study

Mediated Communication 5 http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/MC10020/the_internet.html 

The Internet - A Case Study 

Introduction 

Rod Munday 

The two media case study lectures conclude this week with an account of 

the development of the internet. Unlike many other inventions, it is hard 

to conceive of the internet as being the work of one person, or even a 

group of individuals, rather it is the result of the coming together of many 

different kinds of technologies. The internet is part computer hardware, 

part communications network and part software. However, we must 

remember that these technologies were not invented specifically with the 

internet in mind. All of these technologies emerged out of quite separate 

research paths with their own goals and motivations. In this sense the 

story of the creation of the internet can be regarded not so much as a 

linear narrative, but as a genealogy, and visualised as a kind of family 

tree consisting of generations of different discoveries. Or more accurately 

perhaps, the internet genealogy can be represented as a series of cuttings 

from different family trees all growing together in the same pot. 

In order to make sense of this complex metaphor, we will be looking at 

three branches of the internet family tree. Firstly the development of the 

computer, secondly the development of the network that would 

eventually become the internet and thirdly the personal computer 

revolution which facilitated its widespread adoption in the 1990s. 

1. The Computer Family Tree 

Liebniz and Binary 

A crucial invention for computing emerged three hundred years before 

the first electronic computer. This is the binary system of mathematics. 

The binary system, or base two, is a method of calculation readily 

adaptable to electrical circuitry, because binary exists only as a series of 

ones and zeros, which can be readily made to correspond with the "on" or 

"off" states of an electrical switch. Thus, the binary system is the 

mathematical foundation on which all of today's digital technology is 

built. Binary was actually discovered in India in the third century BC 

(Wikipedia 2006a), but it became known in the West when it was 

re-discovered in the seventeenth century by Gottfried Liebniz, a German 

philosopher and mathematician working under the patronage of the 

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Hanover royal family (Borgmann 1999, 141). 

fig. 2, Liebniz 

As a philosopher, Liebniz was famous for formulating the doctrine of 'the 

best of all possible worlds,' for which he was mercilessly caricatured by 

Voltaire in the novel Candide, as the hopelessly optimistic Dr. Pangloss 

(Russell 1991, 563). As a mathematician, apart from rediscovering binary 

he is also credited with inventing calculus independently of Sir Isaac 

Newton. The devout and God-fearing Liebniz regarded the binary 

system, as the mathematical expression of God's first act of creation: "let 

there be light and there was light." Liebniz thought creation itself was 

born out of a binary equation, reasoning that, out of divine unity (one) 

and formless nothing (zero) everything else could be generated 

(Borgmann 1999, 141). 

Babbage and The First Computer 

In 1822, Charles Babbage sketched out his designs for the first computer, 

the 'Difference Engine No. 1'. A machine he later unsuccessfully 

attempted to build. Affected by this failure, but nevertheless resolutely 

determined to try again, Babbage set about designing a second machine, 

an endeavour that would consume the rest of his life. This machine, the 

'Difference Engine No. 2', was never built either. But Babbage's failure 

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today has become a source of tantalizing speculations; that human history 

would have turned out very differently if he had succeeded. For example, 

his story inspired the 'Steam-punk' genre of science fiction created by 

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (fig. 1). 

fig. 3, The first 'Steam-punk' novel 

However, such romantic flights of fancy were brought back down to 

earth, when in the early 1990s the London Science Museum 

commissioned the construction of what turned out to be a working model 

of Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2. 

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fig. 4, Difference Engine No. 2 

While the design worked beautifully, the machine turned out to be little 

more than a very slow mechanical calculator. What this shows, apart 

from exposing certain excesses of cultural mythologizing, is that in order 

to be able to process significant amounts of information, a computer has 

to operate at light speed. This means that its switching has to be 

electronic rather than mechanical. 

The first electronic computer 

The prototypes for the first electronic computer started to appear around 

the time of the Second World War. 

fig. 5, Colossus at Bletchley Park, UK 

Most famously, there was Colossus, a valve-driven calculator built to 

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crack the German 'Enigma' code. Colossus was built in 1943, by a team 

based at Bletchley Park in the UK, and headed by the brilliant 

mathematician Alan Turing. Turing's dreamt of a "universal machine," 

which would run on Leibniz's binary code and be capable of performing 

any task it was programmed for. This dream was to inspire later 

generations of computer scientists. 

fig. 6, ENIAC, the first electronic computer 

The first truly electronic computer was built three years later in 1946 in 

the US, at the university of Pennsylvania, by John Eckert, Herman 

Goldstein and John Mulchay. Known as ENIAC (Electronic Numeral 

Integration and Computer), it was a valve driven behemoth, so massive 

that it filled an entire gymnasium. ENIAC also drew so much electrical 

power, that on the night when it was first switched on, electric lights all 

over the city of Philadelphia blinked. 

fig. 7, valves versus transistors, a size comparison 

In 1948, the shift to computer miniaturisation began with the invention of 

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the transistor by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, 

who later won the Nobel prize for their efforts. The transistor did away 

with the vacuum container of glass which housed the valve and thus 

shrunk the components of a computer to a fraction of their former size. 

Later still transistors would be etched onto wafers of silicon and the 

integrated circuit would replace transistors. 

In 1964, the future pace of miniaturisation was predicted by the then 

president of Intel, George Moore. "Moore's Law," stated that the amount 

of transistors that could be placed on a single circuit would double every 

eighteen months. A prediction which has, more or less, been true ever 

since. Thus, by the early 1960s, computers had grown smaller, filling a 

room rather than a gymnasium, and they were faster and more capable 

too. 

2. The Internet Family Tree 

Who invented the internet? 

The most often cited answer to the question, "who invented the internet?" 

is that it was an initiative of the US, 'Defence Department Advanced 

Research Project Agency,' or DARPA for short. In 1957, at the height of 

the Cold War, the Soviet Union launched the space satellite 'Sputnik' (fig. 

8). 

fig. 8, Sputnik 

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Visible from earth, and shining like a new star in the night sky, Sputnik 

created a profound sense of anxiety in the minds of the American people. 

It seemed to them to be proof of the Russian enemy's vast technological 

superiority. Even though the satellite was actually little more than a radio 

transmitter capable only of broadcasting a repetitive beep back to Earth. 

As a result of this spectacular Soviet propaganda coup many bold 

initiatives were given the green light in the US. One of these was the 

Apollo missions to the moon, another was the development of the system 

that would eventually become the internet. 

The protean internet 

At first, the internet was just an idea for a single computer network. The 

germ of the idea was first seeded by US military generals in the form of a 

question: "Was it possible to build a communications system that could 

survive a nuclear war?" (Back in the early 1960s, it seemed prudent to 

plan for such a terrifying contingency). 

fig. 9, Paul Baran 

In 1964 a researcher at a Cold War think tank called the Rand 

Corporation, Paul Baran (fig. 9) thought he had come up with an answer. 

Baran reasoned that, in order to have the best chance of survive an 

nuclear war, a communication system would have to be designed as a 

matrix of interconnecting nodes. And each node would have to be 

autonomous. In other words it would have to be capable of sending and 

receiving messages on its own, without taking instructions from 

elsewhere. The nodes therefore had to be computers, because, in the 

event of a full-scale nuclear exchange, computers were the only devices 

which could process the vast number of complex instructions necessary 

to keep the network running. 

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To understand how this Baran's idea works, imagine series of dots 

connected by a lattice of lines as in fig. 10. 

fig. 10, a distributed network of nodes 

Each dot, or node, on this lattice represents a computer. The lines 

between the dots represent the communication lines linking the 

computers together. You can see from fig. 10, that there are a lot of 

potential ways for a message to get from one nodal point to another. 

Actually, compared to the centralised phone system, this is a very 

inefficient and expensive way of sending a message, but the redundancy 

in the system was also its strength, because it made it very robust. 

Messages could not only be routed via any nodal point, but they could 

also be copied and re-sent by any nodal point as well. Thus, the 

probability of receiving a message was much higher. In fact it was as 

high as the number of nodes in the system. Much later, this robustness 

would create problems for internet censorship, because in the words of a 

well known Hacker aphorism, "the internet sees censorship as damage 

and routes around it." 

As an additional safeguard, the messages that were sent and received by 

this system were also broken up into packets of information, each packet 

being separately addressed. For example, if the message was broken 

down into ten packets, each packet would be labelled "one out of ten," 

"two out of ten," "three out of ten" and so on. In this way, the message as 

a whole would be much less susceptible to loss or damage, because the 

receiving computer would be able to tell that, say, parts "four" and "five" 

out of the ten packets had not been received and could request they were 

sent again. 

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ARPANET 

In 1969, five years after the initial idea was proposed, the first network 

came 'online.' The reason for the delay was because it took that long to 

design the packet-switching protocols, that allowed the computers to 

'talk' to one another. The system was known as ARPANET, as a tribute to 

DARPA, its military sponsor. At first ARPANET consisted of just four 

computer nodes (fig. 11). 

fig. 11, ARPANET in 1969 - four nodes 

The data capacity of the entire system was also incredibly small by 

today's standards. The whole system could handle only 56,000 bits of 

information, or the equivalent of the data transfer from one 56Kb 

modem. As a consequence, only text messages were sent at first. 

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fig. 12, ARPANET in 1971 - fifteen nodes 

During the 1970s, ARPANET grew exponentially and, as it grew, an 

interesting social phenomenon began to emerge. The military scientists 

using ARPANET started to post non-military communiqués and even 

gossip on the network. Also, because each user had their own personal 

account, the same message could be addressed to multiple recipients, 

which was how mailing lists got started. Gossiping on the network was 

of course frowned upon by the military authorities, since in the 1970s 

computers were so expensive that computer time was a precious 

resource, but it continued nevertheless. 

fig. 13, ARPANET 1980 — 70 network nodes, 100s of computers 

By the early 1980s, ARPANET users numbered in the thousands. In 

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addition, it was also being used by non-military scientists and other 

academic institutions including the 'National Science Foundation,' 

'NASA' and the 'Department of Energy.' Because of this diversification, 

in 1984, DARPA decided to break up ARPANET into six networks, or 

domains as they were known. Each domain was given a specific address. 

For example, military communications would now have their own 

dedicated network, MILNET, which would be identified with the suffix 

".mil," while non-military communications would be divided up under 

several headings and given their own unique suffixes. Foreign countries 

chose to be denoted by their geographical locations, for instance ".uk" for 

Britain. Educational organisations were given ".edu", commercial 

operations ".com", and non governmental organisations and other non 

profit concerns ".org." Finally ".net" was reserved for other network 

gateways (Sterling 1993). 

The breaking apart of ARPANET meant that the system was no longer a 

single network, but rather a collection of interconnecting networks. This 

was possible because of some new improved switching protocols, 

developed by DARPA and known as TCP/IP (Transfer Control 

Protocol/Interconnecting Protocol). Using TCP, many different computer 

networks could be joined together into what became known as the 

'network of networks,' which was also called ARPA-INTERNET, or the 

INTERNET for short. 

3. The Home Computing Family Tree 

Counter Culture Computing 

As Manuel Castells observes, the first phase of the internet was a unique 

blend of military strategy, big science and counter culture innovation 

(Castells 1996, 351). The third of these factors found expression in the 

revolutionary rise of the personal computer in the 1970s and 80s. It was, 

in Castells' words, a technological blossoming of the [hippie] culture of 

freedom, individual innovation and entrepreneurialism (ibid., 5). 

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fig. 14, the Altair 8800 

In 1975, MITS a company based in Albuquerque New Mexico build the 

first personal computer out of a microprocessor that was designed to be 

used in automated traffic lights. The computer was called Altair after a 

planet featured in an episode of Star Trek. Out of this development, two 

Harvard drop-outs were inspired to form a company to write software for 

the Altair. They were Bill Gates and Paul Allen and the company was 

called Microsoft, which was also based in Albuquerque at the time. 

Meanwhile in Palo Alto California, a group of computer enthusiasts had 

been gathering for regular meetings of The 'Homebrew Club,' to show off 

their home-built computers. Two of the members of this club were Steve 

Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Jobs decided to form a company to manufacture 

the home computer his friend Wozniak had built. The company called 

Apple, was launched in 1976 with $91,000 capital. By 1982 the 

company's turnover had reached $583 million. 

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fig. 15, the Apple II personal computer 

The phenomenal success of the Apple personal computer took IBM (then 

the major player in the computer market) completely by surprise. Their 

own version of the PC had to be quickly assembled from 

non-proprietorial parts, using a third-party operating system licensed 

from Microsoft. Interestingly, a decade and a half later, Microsoft would 

similarly fail to see the potential of the Internet, and faced with the 

phenomenal success of 'Netscape Navigator' (invented by Marc 

Andreessen in 1993) was forced to create its own 'Internet Explorer' by 

hastily reworking third-party software, sourced from an outside company 

called Spyglass. (Castells 2001, 176). 

Software in the Public Domain 

Bell labs, the inventers of the original protocols that ran ARPANET, also 

invented the UNIX operating system. This became the software that ran 

all of the computer nodes, which were now called servers. Bell labs was 

part of the US telecommunications giant, AT&T. In the 1970s, AT&T 

enjoyed a military enforced monopoly on all telephone communications 

within the US. But because of the unfair advantage this gave them over 

other companies, AT&T were forced by the US Government to release all 

of their software into the public domain, only charging for the cost of 

distribution. This meant that UNIX was available, essentially as 

freeware. The same conditions applied to the transmission protocol 

TCP/IP, also invented by Bell Labs. Both of these systems later became 

the backbone of the internet. TCP was regarded as such a robust protocol, 

that the joke went that it could even connect two tin cans and a piece of 

string together. Actually successful experiments were later run with it 

using homing pigeons as the message carrier (Wikipedia 2006b). The 

robustness and simplicity of these systems, combined with their 

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cheapness meant that it was relatively easy for any organisation who used 

computers to go online in the 1980s. 

The World Wide Web 

fig. 16, surfing the Net 

However, the uptake for the internet could not be described as 

phenomenal until the mid 1990s. Asa Biggs and Peter Burke refer to a 

book, Technology 2001: The future of Computing and Communications, 

published in 1991, that made no mention of the internet (Briggs and 

Burke 2005, 244). One of the first internet applications to attract wider 

publicity was the World Wide Web (WWW) which was developed in 

1989 by a British researcher, Tim Bernards Lee, working in the CERN 

particle research facility in Switzerland. The 'Web,' as well as email, were 

perceived as the first "killer apps" of the internet. Especially after the 

Mosaic Browser was released as freeware in 1992. Mosaic was the first 

Browser to run on the Windows operating system rather than on UNIX. 

This development, and the launch of Netscape Navigator soon 

afterwards, greatly simplified the activity of web browsing. 

Often, the World Wide Web and the Internet are taken to mean the same 

thing. This is not the case. The internet is a network consisting of other 

networks of computer terminals, while the World Wide Web is a means 

of accessing information over the Internet. Berners-Lee's who formed the 

World Wide Web Consortium in 1994, made his idea available freely, 

with no patent and no royalties. The World Wide Web Consortium later 

championed the idea that the internet should be based on 

non-proprietarily technology as a foundational principle. A utopian 

notion perhaps, but one that has proved to be surprisingly robust, with 

success stories like Google proving that a company does not have to 

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charge users to make a profit online. 

The Web uses a language called hypertext which allows documents to be 

linked together by a series of hyperlinks. Hypertext was invented by Ted 

Nelson in the early 1960s. Back then Nelson harboured his own ideas of 

a global computer network, Project Xanadu, which was later somewhat 

overshadowed by the success of the World Wide Web. A situation that 

Nelson remains bitter about to this day. However Nelson, for his part, 

was inspired by Memex, an ambitious idea to store all the world's 

knowledge on microfilm. Memex was an idea proposed in 1945 by 

Vannevar Bush, the then chairman of the National Advisory Committee 

for Aeronautics, and a personal advisor to president Roosevelt. These 

examples indicate that the dream to build a repository of all the world's 

knowledge is not new. In fact the great library at Alexandria, constructed 

around 300 B.C., can also be conceived of as such a repository. 

Conclusion 

Fig. 17, The internet: a force for good or evil? 

The rise of the internet in the 1990s has inspired many superlative 

descriptions. It was not only considered to be the most important medium 

of the twentieth century (Briggs and Burke 2005, 244), but it has also 

been called the most important discovery since writing and an application 

that will usher in a new age, the information age (Castells 1996, 328). 

Hopefully, from reading this account, you will be more aware of the 

social processes responsible for the internet's creation. Long before the 

internet existed, in fact two thousand seven hundred years ago, human 

beings discovered a way to preserve their thoughts externally, in the form 

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of writing. This was the true start of the information age. However, even 

before then, communication has always been something which has 

defined our species, and therefore, it is not surprising that it is something 

we have always striven to achieve, whether this be in the form of posting 

personal messages on ARPANET, or inventing smoke signals. 

Regarding technological determinism, Castells argues that, in a sense, it 

is a false dilemma, since "technology is society and society cannot be 

understood or represented without its technological tools" (Castells 1996, 

5). Raymond Williams echoes these sentiments, reasoning that the debate 

between technological determinists and social determinists is essentially 

a sterile one, because "each side has abstracted technology away from 

society" (Williams 2003, 6). 

The rise of the internet has inspired many people to speculate about 

profound social consequences. Not all of these speculations have been 

positive, but the majority have been misinformed. Generally speaking, a 

technologically determinist argument can be characterised by the fact that 

it ignores history, culture, and the social context in which technologies 

operate. Technology is cast as a slave diver, beating a drum to which all 

human beings are compelled to dance to, whether they desire to or not. 

Those who spread fears about new technology generally do so in 

ignorance of the fact that fears over new technology are themselves 

nothing new. The problem with their arguments is that they downplay the 

importance of human desire. For while many technologies have been 

credited with creating desire, no technology has yet been invented that is 

capable of removing it. As Freud pointed out, desire has no natural object 

(Appignanesi: 1992, 72), and therefore it is always going to be a law unto 

itself. It is for this reason that word processors will never replace pen and 

ink, as long as people desire to write letters by hand, and the internet will 

not replace books, as long as people desire to read them. While the point 

is conceded that the majority of people no longer desire to write with 

quills, or carve markings into the side of clay pots. This does not mean 

that there is any technological prohibition capable of preventing a person 

doing these things. Indeed, if I desire to write with a quill, all I need to do 

is find a feather. 

References 

Apignanesi, Richard, Oscar Zarate, Freud for Beginners, London: Icon 

books, 1992. 

Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke (2005): A Social History of the Media, 

Oxford: Polity 

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Borgmann, Albert (1999), Holding On To Reality, London: University of 

Chicago Press. 

Castells, Manuel (1996), The Rise of the Network Society, London: 

Blackwell Publishers. 

Castells Manuel (2001), "Epilogue," in Pekka Himanen’s, The Hacker 

Ethic: the Spirit of the Information Age, London: Vintage Publishers. 

Russell, Bertrand (1991), History of Western Philosophy, London: 

Routledge. 

Sterling, Bruce (1993), "A Short History of the Internet," URL 

http://w3.ag.uiuc.edu/AIM/scale/nethistory.html 

Wikipedia (2006a), " Binary numeral system," URL 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_numeral_system 

Wikipedia (2006b), "Internet protocol suite," URL http://en.wikipedia.org 

/wiki/Tcp/ip [Accessed 10/10.06] 

Williams, Raymond (2003), Television (Technology and Cultural Form), 

London: Routledge 

Additional Sources 

Good images of ARPANET and other images can be found on, "An Atlas 

of Cyberspace," URL http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas 

/historical.html 

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The Internet - A Case Study

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