The internet at 60

On the 30th anniversary of the Internet, its founders look deep into the future and see the 'Net everywhere.

By SHARON GAUDIN
Network World, 09/20/99

Thirty years ago, two events altered American culture - Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon and the birth of the Internet.

The installation of the first node, the first logon over the network, the first e-mail message - these events didn't find their way into American folklore. But the founders of the Internet, along with industry watchers and historians, have their own tales to tell. Ray Tomlinson has been working with BBN Technologies, a hotbed of Internet interest and development, since 1967. It was there he created e-mail and was the first one to use the @ symbol in a transmission.

"It was sort of a neat hack . . . It's pretty amazing that so many people are using it," he says. "From the outset, I kind of thought it would be as ubiquitous as computers, but at the time there were so few computers, it didn't seem it would get that much use. I didn't expect, for instance, that all my neighbors would have access to e-mail. And I'm certainly not the biggest e-mailer in the world. I've got two accounts. That's it. I certainly prefer it to the telephone."

And Tomlinson says he doesn't mind that he, unlike his invention, hasn't become a household name: "More and more people are knowing who I am, but I don't really think about it much at all. I kind of enjoy the anonymity. That way I can get my job done."

Chuck Brownstein was with the National Science Foundation back in 1987, and he worked with IBM, MCI and the University of Michigan to build the first giant backbone that connected smaller networks. Today he is with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, still working on moving information.

"I did know how important our work was back then. Yea! And it only cost, well; I'd say a few million dollars," he says. "I don't even know how to calculate the return on that. It would be thousands of millions of times based on the economic impact it's had on the United States . . . . I believe it was really revolutionary. Anything the mind can contemplate, the Internet can move around . . . It's going to extend human intelligence in ways people cannot contemplate." Leonard Kleinrock, largely considered to be one of the fathers of the Internet, researched packet switching and then helped install the first node at UCLA just a touch more than 30 years ago. "We got it done and nobody outside our group cared," he says. "Nobody gave a damn . . . . I would go to conferences and sit on panels with the telephone guys and ask them to please give us good data communications. They would say, 'Little boy, go away. You represent no revenue for us.' Ha! Now those large telephone companies are fighting for their lives because Internet technology is so critical to them."

David Brin is a science-fiction writer who often envisions the future of the Internet in books such as Earth and Transparent Society. He wasn't there at the beginning of the 'Net, but he spends many of his days contemplating where it's going.

"The Internet was most heavily influenced by suspicion of authority and reverence for eccentricity," he says. "They continue their influence today, fostering a visceral hostility that most users feel toward any attempt to create some centralized power or authority . . . . We are entering an era when the normal cognitive powers of human beings will expand prodigiously. The second half of this century has seen far greater transformations wrought by the human spirit, than by technology. As education spread, we have cast aside old bigotries and realigned our notions of fairness to startling degrees. The Internet cannot match that yet, but it can aid it."