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| The first widespread "telecommunications" were the telegraph, the telephone, and the radiotelegraph. Earlier systems of signalling using colored flags and such traveled, of course, at the speed of light, but were constrained by physical limitations at the sender, at the receiver, and between the two. These systems put the "tele" in "telecommunications" and allowed communication over long distances. It is not correct to say the companies won the fight to control them. This implies there even was one. There was none, not even the opportunity for one<ref>Tom Standage, in his 1998 book ''The Victorian Internet'', which I haven't had the chance of reading, characterizes the telegraph as the Victorian internet, complete with text messaging abbreviations.</ref>. | | The first widespread "telecommunications" were the telegraph, the telephone, and the radiotelegraph. Earlier systems of signalling using colored flags and such traveled, of course, at the speed of light, but were constrained by physical limitations at the sender, at the receiver, and between the two. These systems put the "tele" in "telecommunications" and allowed communication over long distances. It is not correct to say the companies won the fight to control them. This implies there even was one. There was none, not even the opportunity for one<ref>Tom Standage, in his 1998 book ''The Victorian Internet'', which I haven't had the chance of reading, characterizes the telegraph as the Victorian internet, complete with text messaging abbreviations.</ref>. |
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| The same story unfolded largely in relation to radio and television. Except in the United States, where corporations dominated, governments operated broadcasting systems. The large capital investments needed made it impractical, if not impossible, for private individuals to run a radio or TV station in any way. | | The same story unfolded largely in relation to radio and television. Except in the United States, where corporations dominated, governments operated broadcasting systems<ref>For an exception to this exception, which the US government tried and succeeded to destroy, see [https://www.amren.com/features/2020/07/silencing-dissent-by-law/ Silencing Dissent - By Law].</ref>. The large capital investments needed made it impractical, if not impossible, for private individuals to run a radio or TV station in any way. |
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| After World War II came telex, a service which connected teleprinters around the world. Teleprinters had existed long before the war, of course, and their purpose was to allow text to be sent faster over telegraph lines by automatically sending encoded text instead of relying on a human telegraph operator to manually tap out dots and dashes. A "teletype" device would type out the encoded text it received onto a mounted piece of paper - like a typewriter being controlled by the sender of the message. In turn, the receiver would type on their own typewriter, but the letters would be sent through the telegraph lines and appear on that of the sender. Hook this up to telephone instead of telegraph lines, and you've got yourself a modem. | | After World War II came telex, a service which connected teleprinters around the world. Teleprinters had existed long before the war, of course, and their purpose was to allow text to be sent faster over telegraph lines by automatically sending encoded text instead of relying on a human telegraph operator to manually tap out dots and dashes. A "teletype" device would type out the encoded text it received onto a mounted piece of paper - like a typewriter being controlled by the sender of the message. In turn, the receiver would type on their own typewriter, but the letters would be sent through the telegraph lines and appear on that of the sender. Hook this up to telephone instead of telegraph lines, and you've got yourself a modem. |
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| Brevity was absolutely necessary with the telex, just as it had been with the telegraph. Just as telegrams were billed by the character, space was at a premium on telexes as well. So it is not inconceivable that some chat abbreviations could have diffused from telex writers to the general population, and carried by some of its members to the Internet. But, at this point, it is probably a fruitless endeavor to attempt to prove or disprove this bald assertion, and we therefore will not pursue it. | | Brevity was absolutely necessary with the telex, just as it had been with the telegraph. Just as telegrams were billed by the character, space was at a premium on telexes as well. So it is not inconceivable that some chat abbreviations could have diffused from telex writers to the general population, and carried by some of its members to the Internet. But, at this point, it is probably a fruitless endeavor to attempt to prove or disprove this bald assertion, and we therefore will not pursue it. |
| ===Technical precedents===
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| Computers used to be big, expensive, and slow. Hopefully you knew this, if not now you do.
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| ====Modems====
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| When I said "hook this up to telephone instead of telegraph lines", I was speaking figuratively. For people in the late 1800s were not stupid and even less inclined to spending money when they could save it, and if telephone and telegraph lines were compatible, they would not have laid out both. The truth is, of course, they are not. With a telegraph line, either it is transmitting a signal, or it is not. By contrast, a telephone line has to transmit a current with modulating (changing) amplitude and frequency to electrically represent the human voice and other sounds. Hence, although you may think the latter is more advanced than the former, and be right, the former is "digital" because it's either on or off and the latter is "analog" because it can be in states other than 100% power and 0% power.
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| But because telephone lines are cheaper than leasing telegraph lines and because of the aforementioned thrift of our forefathers, it had to be done anyway. As to what they were used for, read on to find out!
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| ====Time-sharing====
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| "Multitask" is one of those words that have...always been there, right? If not, it's one counselors and elementary school teachers love, so it must have been invented by one of them, right? Wrong.
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| It's a computing term (what did you expect?). It means the ability to have multiple programs running at once. If you're reading this and also working on a paper or listening to music on the same computer, that's what you're doing. The first computer to have this feature was the IBM System/360 mainframe in 1965. Back then computers were used for, well, calculations, of the sort you wouldn't be able to do with a slide rule or an adding machine, especially complex equations. One person wouldn't always have two or more calculations to do at the same time. So time-sharing was developed to distribute the cost of using a mainframe among multiple users all of whom enjoyed its advantages.
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| With time-sharing, each user would have a computer terminal with a CRT screen that displayed in only one color, green, and a keyboard. Operating a terminal superficially resembled working at the computer itself; in fact, many people thought their terminals ''were'' computers, when in fact they were just the input and output mechanisms for ones. Users would type things on their terminals; this would be transmitted via the modem through telephone lines to the room filled with the processors of the mainframe, and the output would in turn display on the CRT screen.
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| Computers were not connected ''to'' each other at this stage; that would have to wait for an advance in transmission technology.
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| ====Different methods of switching====
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| ''How'' exactly a message gets sent from A to B is important for all telecommunications networks.
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| The system used by the plain, old telephone service (POTS; yes, this is literally the abbreviation they use) is called ''circuit switching''. In the earliest days of the telephone, you'd pick up the phone, say "Hello Central, please give me number <four-digit number>," and a human telephone operator at the telephone exchange would manually connect the jack where your line ended with that where your recipient's one ended and you would talk on a line just for the two of you.
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| By the time we're talking about, though, most systems used rotary dials. You've probably seen one in old movies and such, but here's how to use one. You pick the handset up, and you stick your finger in the hole that corresponds to the digit you want to dial, and rotate the dial until your finger hits the metal guard, called the finger stop. You then pull your finger out and the dial returns to its original position. While it's doing so, it opens and, about 50 milliseconds thereafter, closes the contacts along the way which send out pulses to the exchanges. There are different systems for different countries, but since our story mostly happens in North America, we'll use the North American system, which incidentally is the easiest to understand. One pulse represents the number 1, two pulses represent 2, etc. The telephone exchange will mechanically connect you to whoever you're calling based on the pulses. Repeat for every digit of your number (7 for local calls; 10 for long-distance). If you made a mistake, too bad; hang up and try again!
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| Even then, they were being slowly replaced by dual-tone multi-frequency dialing, how your landline and mobile phone work today. Instead of rotary dialing, you press buttons on your telephone. Each button plays a superposition of a high-frequency sine wave and a low-frequency sine wave. (You can hear the tones when you press a button on a landline or your mobile phone will simulate the tones for you when you press its keypad to call.) There's four high-freq and four low-freq sine waves, and so there are sixteen possible tones; ten of them are the 10 digits of our decimal number system, and the other 6 are *, #, A, B, C, and D respectively. (You don't find the last four on most keypads nowadays.)
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| You may wonder how all this technical information is related. Well, it will be needed when we get to phreaks, so for now, hold it in. But the important thing is, through these innovations, the essential principle of circuit switching did not change. And circuit switching was not sufficient for the new technology that was struggling to burst out of the womb of computer science.
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| An improved method was called ''message switching''. Circuit switching was wasteful, because it established a connection directly between two devices. And with a computer network, you didn't need to communicate with the same computer all the time. So this new system was devised. Each message would contain the body of the message, and a header indicating the address to which it was to be passed. Every message would be sent to an intermediate node closer to its destination than was its origin. The intermediate node would store it until a path to get the message closer to its destination opened up, at which point it would forward it to a closer node, which would do the same until the message reached its destination.
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| From there on, it was not a big jump to conceive of ''packet switching'', the quite literal fundamental principle of the modern Internet. Packet switching pretty much follows the same theory as message switching, except messages are split into smaller packets which are transmitted separately.
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| ===Laying the groundwork===
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| All the ingredients were there. All that was needed was an ''idea'' and the whole thing would get started.
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| ====JCR Licklider====
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| He's the first person in this whole history to have a whole (''sub''-''sub'')chapter to himself. The reasons he is given such a focus will become apparent as you read on. In the 1960s, computers were generally regarded as instruments of government control, the devices that allowed governments to monitor their citizenry. More than anyone else, he made it possible to envision a parallel universe where the computer was an instrument which empowered the common people and tend to the common good of humankind. Both views of the computer are right, of course, in their own way, depending on what we do. But he must be credited with even making the latter vision possible.
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| Looking through his papers<ref>[http://memex.org/licklider.pdf "The Computer as a Communication Device" (1968)] starting at p. 26</ref>, it's not hard to get a feeling that its author is a man whose role in the history of the Internet has been criminally underappreciated. He predicts some things that have come true. For example, "life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity. Second, communication will be more effective and productive, and therefore more enjoyable." He prophesies some things that have not yet come true. For example, "[a]n OLIVER is, or will be when there is one, an 'on-line interactive vicarious expediter and responder,' a complex of computer programs and data that resides within the network and acts on behalf of its principal, taking care of many minor matters that do not require his personal attention and buffering him from the demanding world. 'You are describing a secretary,' you will say. But no! Secretaries will have OLIVERS." And he dreams of things which may never come true, such as the concluding sentence of the paper: "Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever, for consider the magnitude of the task of adapting the network’s software to all the new generations of computer, coming closer and closer upon the heels of their predecessors until the entire population of the world is caught up in an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging."
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| Like all epic heroes, he died, Moses like, on the threshold of the Promised Land to which he had led the world.
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| ====Fundamental idea of the Internet====
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| If you've ever tried to transfer anything from a Windows PC to a Mac, you know how much of a pain in the butt working with different operating systems is. At least, in this case, the developers of Windows and macOS know that their users will have to work with other computers of the same or a different operating system, and have put some thought into making their operating systems compatible with each other. Imagine what it must have been like for the Internet's first pioneers, who had to link together computers whose creators never envisioned would ever ''need'' to compatible with any other ones!
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| A university, company, or government agency would have one big mainframe computer all whose users would "time-share" on it. (See [[#Time-sharing|above]] if you don't remember.) If you needed to transfer a program from one computer to another, you'd physically take the punched cards or the magnetic tape and feed it into the other computer. Woe betide you if you tripped carrying a stack of punched cards and had to sort them back into the right order!
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| This sounds simple, but like almost everything in these days, it was not. Unless you got lucky, the computer you were transferring to didn't read the same language as the one you were transferring from. In fact, it had only been a few years since a standard system for representing ''letters'' (ASCII) had been agreed upon! So, most people would have just given up and coded the program all over again in the language of the target computer. It would have been a herculean, and most probably futile, effort, to make all these giant, slow mainframes compatible with each other.
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| Fortunately, an ingenious idea ensured that'd never need to happen.
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| The idea was simple: create a standard protocol for just the network. Have smaller packet-switching computers connected to each big computer in the network, that will convert things sent from the computer to this protocol. Each node will be responsible for the conversions from their own computer to the protocol.
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| The packet-switching computers were called Interface Message Processors or IMPs; the abbreviation was pronounced like the word "imp". They are the ancestors of today's routers, but you'd never guess that just by looking at them. They were the size of a refrigerator and taller than those who operated them. But without them we wouldn't have modems, and therefore not routers.
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| The IMPs were built by Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, or BBN for short. They were a private company but they were referred to as "Cambridge's third university" - after Harvard and MIT, which gives you an idea of how well they were regarded. Four were built.
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| ==Notes== | | ==Notes== |
| <references /> | | <references /> |
