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History of Data Communications

Transferring signals from one computer to another or between peripherals has always been a major design problem in information technology. Bus technology, or the transfer of large amounts of data on one or more wires, has been with us since the earliest computers. These early computer designs often had major components, such as printers or card readers, spread around quite a large room, whereas today we expect to have them in a small box on our bench or on our lap or even in our pocket! The old computers had interfaces to move the data over many metres between CPU's to magnetic tape storage reels, to printers, data input, data output etc. However all of these were proprietary and each company's design varied greatly from one company to the next. One brand of printer could not be hooked into another brand of CPU.

One dominant pressure came to bear on the computer designs, and that was the need to exchange data between different machines, different versions of those machines, and, more importantly between the different brands of computers. The period of hostilities between western and eastern countries during the 1950's to 1980's, often called "The Cold War", sparked an enormous amount of research and development into electronic communications of all sorts. These ranged from satellite imaging to deep sea sonar listening devices that could sense explosions halfway across the world. The impetus to override the incompatibilities to enable large expensive computers to quickly communicate (the time it could take for an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead to go from east to west, or vice versa, figured strongly as a time frame) to respond to national threats and help organise a retaliatory strike was paramount. It is no wonder the popular acronym for the eventual standoff that occurred was called MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). However it did cause a very good design for networking to be developed and one that has been so thoroughly worked on and promoted, that it has become the most dominant and surprisingly not a proprietary standard.

Commercial software designers are always torn between two conflicting strategies. The first is developing a product that will interface or exchange data with other products and allow other products to interface with it. The second is to come up with a design that is unique and corners a commercially viable niche in the market. Information technology history is littered with companies that have developed proprietary products where their incompatibility has made them dead-ends. An example may be where the company that designs the dominant operating system changes it significantly and a previously working version of another company's software no longer works properly. If the programmers of the dominant operating system subsequently choose to make a similar product that does work properly, then the original product is squeezed out because it no longer complies completely with the new version of the operating system. Definite winners and losers!

While electrically powered printing was born in the telegraph business after World War One, the Second World War saw the use of electronic typewriters that could transmit and receive over long distances. This method of communication grew quickly as it helped reduce the transcription errors caused by wireless operators listening to Morse code. The typewriters, or more correctly teleprinters, could be used locally for connecting up field units using a single strand of wire or operate through communications wireless sets. Either way the notion of connecting a headquarters with remote sending and receiving devices was born. The use of the Baudot system on the old "current loop sensing" teleprinters and later the use of the ASCII system on the more modern teleprinters (using RS232 interfaces) established the enormous advantage of common codes and interfaces. A major restriction was the connections between machines that were controlled outside of the data being sent (often using manual telephone style exchanges) and connections were one to one with a break in that single connection causing total loss of the transmission of data.

"In 1969 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a research and development project to create an experimental packet switching network. This network, called ARPANET was built to study techniques for providing robust, reliable, vendor-independent data communications. Many techniques of modern data communications were developed in the ARPANET."

TCP/IP Network Administration p.2 (O'Reilly and Associates)

By 1975 the basic TCP/IP protocols had been developed and it was pressed into general usage. UNIX was the first operating system to be formally interfaced using the system. The next decade saw the increasing diversification of the network away from its military imperatives and by 1990 was bursting onto the awaiting commercial and public imagination. TCP/IP quickly set the benchmark in terms of serviceable network technology with its open standards and independence from a particular hardware. It provided a means for addresses to travel automatically with data and also offered a collection of established high-level protocols that were immediately useful. It became the standard that all others were judged by.

Its development is the recent history of the Internet itself. The underlying concepts are an interesting study of the theoretical being applied in practice. More details on the history of the internet can be found on this CD under network types > the internet

Google Search

A quick search on google for a short or brief history of networking leads you to a huge array of documents that are neither short nor brief. If you're looking for a timeline of dot points try these offerings.

• A Brief History of Networking - silkroad.com
  http://www.silkroad.com/net-history.html
• Hobbes' Internet Timeline v6.1 by Robert H'obbes' Zakon
  http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
• A Brief History of the Internet in Australia
  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/OzIHist.html
• A Brief History of Computing- Internet and Networking by Stephen White
  http://www.ox.compsoc.net/~swhite/history/timeline-NET.html

If you're after a more narrative approach, try these:

• Short History of the Internet by Bruce Sterling
  http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AIM/scale/nethistory.html
• A Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN by Ben Segal
  http://ref.cern.ch/CERN/CNL/2001/001/tcpip/
• A Brief History of the Internet - by the Internet society
  http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml

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