Era 01 · 1969–1993
Connection Era
Letting different computers and networks talk to each other
- Start
- 1969-10-29 ARPANET sends its first message
- End
- 1993 CERN opens up the World Wide Web and Mosaic is released; web commercialization begins in 1994
Background and drivers
- Hardware: mainframes and minicomputers were expensive and scarce, held mainly by research institutions and the military; personal computers and workstations started to spread in the 1980s.
- Networks: telephone lines and leased lines, with speeds measured in kbps; network protocols from different vendors and countries were mutually incompatible (such as X.25, DECnet, SNA).
- Economics: against the backdrop of the Cold War, the US Department of Defense (ARPA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) footed the bill, with essentially no commercial capital.
- Users: scientists, engineers, and university faculty and students, numbering in the tens of thousands.
- Policy: the NSFNET backbone was initially limited to research and education use; in 1992 US legislation opened it to commercial traffic, and in 1995 NSFNET was retired and the backbone was handed over to commercial operators; China began connecting research networks in the late 1980s, though access to the international internet was limited by political factors.
Pain points
- Expensive computing resources could not be shared remotely, so researchers had to go to the machine room and wait in line.
- Different vendors and different networks could not interoperate, and every new connection required a dedicated conversion.
- Network addresses relied on a single, hand-maintained HOSTS.TXT file, which became unmanageable once there were many machines.
- Files were scattered across different machines; to find one you first had to know which directory on which machine it was in.
- The network was built on the assumption that “everyone trusts everyone,” with no security design at all.
New technology and practices
- Packet switching and ARPANET → pain point 1: many computers sharing one line made remote login and file transfer possible.
- Email (1971) → pain point 1: asynchronous communication between researchers, which later became the most widely used application on the network.
- TCP/IP (1974 paper, standardized as RFC 791/793 in 1981, with ARPANET fully switching over in 1983) → pain point 2: a single “internetworking protocol” to connect heterogeneous networks, and the source of the word “internet.”
- DNS, the Domain Name System (RFC 882/883 in 1983) → pain point 3: managing names in a layered, distributed way, replacing the manual hosts file.
- The World Wide Web (proposed in 1989, made public in 1991): HTML + HTTP + URL → pain point 4: using hyperlinks to weave scattered documents into one web, so a single click jumps to a document on another machine.
- The CERT/CC incident response center (founded after the 1988 Morris worm) → pain point 5: for the first time there was a dedicated organization for handling network security incidents.
Roles of this era
- BackendBackend Engineer
Systems programmers, writing operating systems, network protocol stacks, and Unix tools.
System administrators, managing machine rooms, accounts, tape backups, and network connectivity.
- SecuritySecurity Engineer
Incident responders, with the starting point being the Morris worm.
Security & law thread
- GlobalThe US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) of 1986: enacted in 1984 with Pub. L. 98-473 and named the CFAA in 1986 by Pub. L. 99-474, now codified at 18 U.S.C. §1030 (current text: U.S. Code 2024 edition(opens in a new window)).
- GlobalOn November 2, 1988, the Morris worm infected a substantial share of the hosts on the internet at the time, directly leading to the founding of CERT/CC and marking the first conviction under the CFAA.
- ChinaThe first email was sent in 1987.
- ChinaThe .CN top-level domain was registered in 1990.
- ChinaComputer security legislation would not come until 1994 (see the next era).
Key events
ARPANET's first message is sent from UCLA to SRI
Ray Tomlinson implements network email, using `@` to separate user and host
Cerf and Kahn publish the TCP paper “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication”
RFC 791 (IP) and RFC 793 (TCP) are published
ARPANET fully switches over to TCP/IP
RFC 882/883 propose DNS
NSFNET is built, becoming the backbone of the academic internet
China's first email, “Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world”: written and first attempted on the 14th, sent successfully on the 20th
Sources: cernet.edu.cn(opens in a new window)
The Morris worm breaks out, and CERT/CC is founded shortly after
Tim Berners-Lee submits the World Wide Web proposal at CERN
Sources: home.cern(opens in a new window)
Qian Tianbai registers the .CN top-level domain on behalf of China
Sources: cernet.edu.cn(opens in a new window)
The World Wide Web project is made public
Sources: home.cern(opens in a new window)
Linus Torvalds announces Linux
The CAS Institute of High Energy Physics opens a 64 kbps leased line to SLAC in the US, giving China partial internet access
Sources to be added
CERN places the World Wide Web software in the public domain; the NCSA Mosaic browser is released the same year
Sources: home.cern(opens in a new window)
On to the next era
The network was connected and the Web existed, but it was still a tool for scientists, with no graphical interface and no commercial use allowed. In 1992 the US opened the backbone to commercial use, in 1993 graphical browsers appeared, and ordinary people and commercial companies began pouring in. The question shifted from “can I connect” to “can I understand it, and what business can I do with it.”