Enterprise Resource Planning

The Internet: Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow

Information Outlook, Vol 5, No. 6, June 2001

The Internet:

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

by Judith Gelernter

Judith Gelernter is the Director of the Library and Curator of Special Collections for the Union Club of the City of New York. She may be reached at judith.gelernter@theunionclub.com

With the span of actual Internet years between yesterday and today under a decade, tomorrow's virtual reality very soon may become actuality. The aim of this article is to demonstrate some current ideas that are dictating directions in online evolution. In contradistinction to the hordes of Internet histories that interleave name, date, place and concept, this brief article attempts to organize time and technical invention around a single concept that comes from the Internet itself. The Internet, by definition, is a network of interconnected computers, and that network is composed of communication channels of varying bandwidth. The greater the bandwidth of a connection, the greater the amount of data that can travel along that line each second, and the faster the communication potential between the computers it connects. Because the drive for faster communication is among those factors that spur the evolution of Internet technology, the bandwidth of the line makes a logical point of reference in reviewing Internet growth.

Yesterday

Planning for the Internet precursor ARPANET began in the 1950s under the aegis of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Department of Defense. The Federal Government required reliable communication channels between the nodes of the proposed network because dedicated telephone lines were undependable, and so the net was designed to create alternative communications pathways between source and destination nodes. Message data to be transmitted would be disassembled into packets of fixed size, and the individual packets could arbitrarily follow any one of several pathways to be...