Spring 2004 Netizen Empowerment and the 30

Anniversary of TCP/IP Volume 12 No 2

Netizen Empowerment and the

30th Anniversary of TCP/IP

This issue of the Amateur Computerist celebrates

a little known but important anniversary in Internet

development. In May 1974 an article appeared in the

technical journal, IEEE Transactions on Commun-

ication, which would have an important impact on

the world.

This article titled “A Protocol for Packet

Network Intercommunication” was written by Robert

E. Kahn and Vinton Cerf.

The article sets out the design and philosophy for

the creation of a protocol. The protocol, was to make

possible communication and interaction between

many different computer networks, networks under

different ownership, control, and often in different

countries. Thus users in different countries and on

different computer networks would be able to com-

municate. This is the basis for the birth of the

Internet. It is also the basis for the birth of the

netizen.

A common myth is that the Internet resulted

from development by the U.S. government and its

packet switching research on the ARPANET. The

ARPANET, however, is but one network of a number

of different networks being built by May 1974, when

the Kahn-Cerf protocol, as it was commonly known

at the time, was officially proposed. The article,

“The Internet: On the International Origin and

Collaborative Vision,” which is featured in this issue

of the Amateur Computerist documents what is

largely an unknown history of the early development

of TCP/IP by collaboration among an international

Table of Contents

Editorial.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 1

Netizens and Internet Governance. . . . . . . . Page 2

International Origin of the Internet. . . . . . . . Page 5

Emergence of Netizens in Japan . . . . . . . . Page 29

group of researchers.

This issue also includes two articles by Izumi

Aizu. One is on the role of netizens in Japan. The

other was presented at a recent workshop of the

United Nation’s World Summit on Information

Society (WSIS) held on February 27, 2004, in

Geneva Switzerland.

WSIS is currently debating the issue of Internet

governance and a number of people from different

organizations have been invited into the process. The

particular task set for the Feb. 27, 2004 workshop

was to propose the areas needing consideration to

determine a form for Internet governance. During the

summary meeting of the workshop, Robert Kahn,

who had chaired one of the sessions, indicated that he

was surprised when netizen empowerment was raised

as a policy consideration for Internet governance.

Kahn wondered whether netizen empowerment

is an appropriate concept when considering policy for

Internet governance. It helps to raise the question: Is

it possible to create a governing structure for the

Internet which leaves out the input and participation

of users, of netizens? I want to propose that this is a

critical question for anyone who claims to be consid-

ering issues related to Internet governance.

Very little input from netizens is currently

possible into the WSIS process. There are a few

online forums that are difficult to join and contribute

to, and which do not encourage netizen participation.

These forums can be viewed at:

http://www.onlinewsis.org/

There is no way provided to send an email to

anyone who has posted on these forums. Nor is there

anyone who is part of the WSIS process who appears

to be participating in the forums and considering how

to present the issues raised to those who are invited to

the UN meetings.

For example, one post on the forum helps to

raise critical issues for Internet governance – public

access for all, and participation in the decisions

Page 1

affecting the future development of the Internet. The

person posting on March 27, 2004 writes: “Internet

Governance covers different dimensions and wide-

ranging issues, hence daunting challenges in imple-

mentation. I would like to underline, in this respect,

the issue of public access and widening the scope of

public engagement in decision-making processes.....

Best Regards, Safaa Moussa, EGYPT”

Yet this post was largely ignored on the online

forum, and in the continuing deliberations for WSIS

as well. Just as the research developing the Internet

relied on the interactive participation and discussion

among those doing the research work, so the continu-

ing governance of the Internet requires the participa-

tion of netizens. A proposal to this effect was submit-

ted to the U.S. government in 1998 and was pre-

sented in an English and French version in the Ama-

teur Computerist.

On the 30th anniversary of the official publica-

tion of the paper that proposed the protocol for the

development of the Internet, this issue of the Amateur

Computerist is dedicated to opening up this discus-

sion online among the users of the Internet, among

the netizens, rather than allowing it to be hidden

behind the closed doors of the U.N. or of the U.S.

government’s ICANN.

Notes:

1. V. Cerf and R. Kahn, “A Protocol for Packet Network

Intercommunication,” IEEE Transactions on Communications,

Vol. COM-22, pp. 637-648, May 1974

http://cs.mills.edu/180/reading/CK74.pdf

2. The authors also give credit to an international group of

researchers including L. Pouzin, R. Scantlebury, H.

Zimmerman, D. Davies, R. Metcalfe, S. Crocker and D. Walden.

at the end of their article.

3. The rest of the post reads: “It should be noted that ICT has

become indispensable for quick access to information from all

over the world and from different sources. It is also a tool for

fostering decision-making processes and open dialogue, which

makes it imperative to improve public accessibility at the lowest

cost possible throughout the world and come up with practical

means for bridging the digital divide.”

Further public engagement, democracy and expression of views

can be promoted through public accessibility to the Internet, to

information, government services, policy documents, and civil

society activities. http://www.wsis-online.net/igov-forum/

forums/message-email?message_id=366112

4. The URL for the proposal “The Internet: An International

Public Treasure: is http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/text/acn9-1.art-

icles/acn9-1.06.txt. Also the proposal is online at the Dept of

Commerce web site. The URL is: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntia-

home/domainname/proposals/hauben/hauben.html

5. See for example:

http://www.circleid.com/article/ 91_0_1_0_C/

[Editor’s Note: On February 27, 2004, the Interna-

tional Telecommunications Union held an experts

workshop to address the question of Internet gover-

nance. The following was presented as part of a panel

chaired by Robert Kahn.]

Netizen Participation in Internet

Governance

ITU Workshop on Internet

Governance

Geneva, February 27, 2004

Izumi Aizu

Deputy Directory,

Institute for HyperNetwork Society

[email protected]

I have been involved with “Internet Gover-

nance,” or areas of global Domain Name system

management since around 1996. I was the Secretary

General of the Asia and Pacific Association, which

became a formal member of the Steering Committee

of the so-called IFWP, International Forum on the

White Paper. The IFWP process was a global effort

to setup a new body to manage the DNS, upon

receiving the call by the United States Government to

“privatize” and “internationalize” the DNS manage-

ment in an open and inclusive approach. We advo-

cated the equal participation in the process and the

body, eventually setup as ICANN, from Asia and

Pacific regional viewpoints. Today, I would like to

provide my proposal of putting the “Netizens” into

the global governing framework of the Internet as we

are tasked by the WSIS process to do.

There is the WSIS Civil Society Internet Gover-

nance Caucus. It has more than 60 individuals from

most of the regions of the world and worked very

hard to contribute to the Civil Society Declaration for

the WSIS in its Internet Governance section. I sug-

gest to you to take the principles proposed there into

serious consideration for the coming debate. It would

Page 2

be more appreciated if this group gets formal recog-

nition and is invited as a group to the next phase of

the discussion including the Working Group under

the Secretary General Koffi Anan.

As we are all aware, we are facing a new kind of

challenge for this Internet Governance.

The Internet made it possible to send and receive

information from anyone’s desktop, laptop, or even

from mobile phones on the go, with minimal cost,

very easily and instantly, to anywhere in the world,

ignoring the geographic and institutional borders

including that of nation states. This fact poses trans-

national challenges that are difficult to solve by

applying the traditional “nation” based approaches.

Frankly, most of the current International or

intergovernmental organizations were designed in the

industrial age and not ready to deal with these na-

tional or global issues as efficiently and effectively as

we want. They are slow to identify the issues, slow to

come up with solutions, slow to agree with each

other, often constrained by national and bureaucratic

borders, and too rigid to respond to the rapid, ever-

changing technologies and their applications. When

they come up with a legal framework against certain

types of spams, the spammers are already well ahead

of the game creating new methods which are hard to

trace and enforce. And this is just a small example of

the large iceberg.

Therefore, there is a clear need to establish a new

governance model in which, I think, the Netizens

from Civil society will play a vital role, in coopera-

tion with the government, International organiza-

tions, business sector and technical community.

First and foremost, the Internet is becoming an

everyday tool, or commodity, for most of us. In Japan

over 60% of the population or 70 million people are

now using the Internet in one way or other, and 70%

of the subscribers are now enjoying a highspeed

broadband connection, which gives an “always on”

feature. Korea as you know has the highest penetra-

tion of broadband, with 80% penetration to the

household and the usage is very high. China, now is

number 2 in terms of the number of users after the

United States with 80 million people. The develop-

ment of I-mode in Japan gave rise to the use of

mobile phones to access the Internet, opening up the

age of ubiquitous, or pervasive networking. As

pointed out by many previous speakers, the Internet

empowers the ordinary citizen with tremendous

power – sending thousands of e-mails to millions of

people at a cost of a few dollars, sending both posi-

tive messages as well as destructive viruses.

With this potential, millions of users are facing,

or creating societal challenges. In Japan, victims of

online dating services or mobile or ordinary Internet,

is on the rise, targeting young women in schools,

with more than 100 serious crimes a year. P2P file

exchange is posing a threat to copyright holders, but

it also is opening up new and creative ways of shar-

ing works among citizens. Compared with these,

Domain Names and IP address management is a far

less serious problem, but we may face more chal-

lenges.

For any Internet governance model to work, it

should fit in with the reality of the local and regional

situation. As one of the few speakers from the Asian

Pacific region, I would like to bring your attention to

the very diverse situation of Internet development in

our region, from highly developed places like Japan

or Korea, to where it is just in its infancy in Afghani-

stan, East Timor and Iraq, suffering from wars and

conflicts, or the tiny economy of Bhutan and many

other LDCs. Though the Internet has been mostly

developed by the so-called “Internet community” in

many Asian countries, similar to that of developed

countries, I could say that governments play a greater

role in supporting the Internet in infrastructure and

capacity building activities.

In the case of Asia and the Pacific, there has

been a very strong tradition of voluntary coordination

and cooperation among the Internet community. Here

are all the “AP” organizations working on different

areas of Internet management, from address and

Domain Name management to infrastructure devel-

Here is a diagram in which “self-governance” will take

place.

Page 3

opment or spam or security matters. We have an

annual summit, just taking place right now in Kuala

Lumpur, Malaysia, called APRICOT. This voluntary

coordination is appreciated by governments but

receives no control, nor financial support from

government at all. It is working just fine.

As many speakers have already mentioned, we

should try to follow the governance model of the

architecture of the Internet which is based on a

layered structure. Functions of each layer are differ-

ent, so too the governance models should be. It is

also necessary, however, to bring about coordination

among different actors at different layers.

The word “Netizen” was first coined by a

20-year old student, the late Michael Hauben, in New

York, in 1993. He was trying to identify the new

residents of the network community, from Net

Citizen to Netizen. These active users were originally

found in the technical community, but now they have

spread into civil society at large. They are the main

actors of the Information Society, as Prof. Shumpei

Kumon of GLOCOM offered in his theoretical

analysis, that in the Information Society, the social

games are played around intellectual values, not

economic values, as in industrial society.

We see very active groups affecting the society,

like slash-dot in the U.S. or 2-channel, its equivalent

in Japan. We know many active political activities

are generated from online forums in Korea, where

Netizen has already become a common Korean term,

affecting the outcome of the Presidential campaign,

or in China where people are now starting to use

online forums to criticize the government (some-

time). The rise of Smart Mobs is illustrated by my

friend Howard Rheingold in his book, showing the

positive and negative potential impact of using these

cheap, open, mobile technologies.

Why then should we let Netizens participate in

this global governance? First, for any democratic

governance it is necessary to establish the Consent of

the Governed as a basic principle of governance. But

we should go even further. The Netizen is the main

actor in Internet development. Netizens are the great

inventors and innovators of such tools as WWW,

Mosaic or Netscape browsers, Yahoo by David Filo

and Jerry Yang, students at Stanford University, or

ICQ or Amazon which were also developed mainly

by users. Missing them is like playing football with-

out any top-notch players. Third, decisions around

Internet governance will affect so many end-users

directly. You need to listen to those who are affected

by the decisions.

Netizens will act as a watchdog, or function to

provide an appropriate Checks and Balances system,

to counter other interests. By involving them they

will have more of a sense of responsibility too.

I also want to try to list some merits of having

Netizens participate.

First, Netizens have direct knowledge and rich

experience on most issues caused by the use of the

Internet. If you are the parents, quite often your

children know much more about using the Net than

you do.

Second, Netizens are flexible, and work more

efficiently than many incumbent institutions where

protocols and procedures take up too much time and

act as barriers for timely decisions.

Third, Netizens are global citizens, not con-

strained by national boundaries. There are many

communities of interest, spread globally, irrespective

of geographic or other existing social boundaries.

Netizen participation will increase diversity. By

making regional balance compulsory, Netizens from

all regions of the globe will participate in governance

activities.

Netizens will provide a counter economic bal-

ance, not dominated by large corporate interests, but

adding non-profit, non-governmental forces. It will

also provide cultural diversity, with a multilingual

environment. It will reduce the marginalization of the

minority, too. By encouraging Netizens to participate,

affirmative efforts to listen to minority groups,

persons with disabilities, women in vulnerable

situations, linguistic minorities, all will have more

opportunities for their voices to be heard.

Netizens share the view with the technical

community that freedom at the edge of the network

is the core value of the Internet. Traditional telecom

operators, or mobile phone operators, on the other

hand, may not necessarily share this vision and tend

to “close” the network by inserting their central

control that is convenient for the operators as well as

the many “passive” consumers. We are concerned

that this may stifle the innovation and development

of the Internet we have enjoyed so far.

There are risks of excluding Netizens from the

global governance mechanism. If we only rely on

technologists, they may lack the human viewpoint. If

we rely too much on corporations, aspects of human

rights might be compromised in the name of profit-

Page 4

making, e.g. in the case of privacy protection. And if

we rely too much on government or bureaucratic

mechanisms, then we may face narrow “top-down”

approaches or closed decisions.

In conclusion, we need to include Netizens for

the self-governance mechanisms to work. This will

help solve the dichotomy of private-sector only

approach vs strong government involvement. It will

create an appropriate, more balanced structure. There

are active Netizens in the developing parts of the

world who will also enhance the balanced participa-

tion. In order to make effective participation of the

Netizens possible, it is necessary that their autono-

mous, distributed and collaborative network of

networks exist. Efforts at ICANN At Large is one

such example, trying to be bottom-up, coordinated

globally, based on the subsidiary principle, that

addresses that local issues be solved locally first, and

seek for global solutions for only globally challeng-

ing issues. We also need self-certification mecha-

nisms in place that work.

I have some suggestions and information for the

upcoming process. We should be really open and

inclusive: We need to involve more stakeholders

from the developing parts of the world, and people in

non-Western regions. We should also consider

reaching out to people with different backgrounds;

people with disabilities, for example, to bring them

into the main stream of the debate. For effective

outreach, regional meetings are essential to be able to

listen to these diverse voices, ones you may not hear

here in Geneva or in New York. To show our com-

mitment, we, ICANN ALAC with other constituen-

cies are hosting a WSIS Workshop at the coming

ICANN Rome meeting next week. It will be on Mar

4, 2004, 11:00 am to12:30 pm and it is open to

everyone. I hope many events like this will be orga-

nized to produce fruitful dialogue among U.S..

[Editor’s Note: In honor of the 30

Anniversary of

TCP/IP we print the following history of the interna-

tional collaboration that make TCP/IP possible.]

The Internet: On its

International Origins and

Collaborative Vision

(A Work In Progress)

by Ronda Hauben

[email protected]

“[T]he effort at developing the Internet Protocols was

international from the beginning.”

Vinton Cerf, “How the Internet Came to Be”

ABSTRACT

The process of the Internet’s development

offers an important prototype to understand

the creation of a multinational collaborative

research project which depends on and

fosters communication across the bound-

aries of diverse administrative structures,

political entities, and technical designs.

The mythology surrounding the origins of

the Internet is that it began in 1969 in the

U.S. That is the date marking the origins of

the ARPANET (a U.S. packet switching

network), but not the birth of the Internet.

The origins of the Internet date from 1973.

The goal of the researchers creating the

Internet was to create a network of net-

works, a means for networks from diverse

countries to intercommunicate. Originally

the design was to link up several national

but diverse packet switching networks

including the ARPANET (U.S.), Cyclades

(France), and NPL (Great Britain). When

that was not politically feasible, the research

project involved Norwegian, British and

American research groups, and researchers

from other countries, especially France, at

various junctures. These research groups did

the early development work. The Internet

was international from its very beginnings.

Page 5

Preface

The following work in progress begins the

investigation of the collaboration between research-

ers from the U.S. and several European countries in

the early development of the Internet. Both Bob Kahn

and Vint Cerf, Internet researchers who are credited

with the invention of the TCP/IP protocol, have noted

that the Internet was international from its very

origins. Yet the common understanding of the devel-

opment of the TCP/IP protocol, the protocol that

made it possible to build the Internet, has been that it

was an American development. This misconception

prevents the development of an accurate public

understanding of the origins of the Internet, and of

the lessons that this early history can provide for the

future. It is impossible to have achieved the develop-

ment of an international network of networks, of the

Internet, without the international participation and

collaboration to build the prototype and the function-

ing implementations of the needed technology.

This hidden history involved researchers from

Great Britain, France, Norway, Germany and Italy,

and the U.S. Recently I have also learned of the

knowledge and interest in computer networking of

researchers in Eastern European countries including

Hungary, Russia and German Democratic Republic.

How the actual historical development unfolded

cannot be known unless there is serious attention to

this research while pioneers of these achievements

are alive and can be interviewed and encouraged to

provide the help they can give. In the following

working draft I begin to document some of the links

and events that have come to the fore. I hope this

working draft will begin the discussion needed to

raise some of the research questions involving the

Internet’s origins that need scholarly collaborative

attention, especially while the Internet pioneers are

still alive.

I - Introduction: How Will the History of

the Internet Be Told?

In a review essay in the December 1998 issue of

the American Historical Review, the author, Roy

Rosenzweig, points to how rarely most histories of

the 20th century mention either computers or the

Internet. Rosenzweig, however, predicts that this will

soon change. He writes: “It is a fair guess that text-

books of the next century will devote considerable

attention to the Internet and larger changes in infor-

mation and communication technologies that have

emerged so dramatically in recent years.” Then he

asks the question, “How will the history be written?”

Discussing several recent books about the history

and development of the Internet, Rosenzweig sug-

gests that no one single account is sufficient; that

there will need to be a more adequate history written

which will include aspects of all the books.

The review raises the question of what is needed

to write the history of the Internet. It also considers

whether the books already written meet the challenge

or if there are essentials left out that can be investi-

gated and documented.

Several of the books that have been written thus

far focus mainly on the development of the

ARPANET.

The ARPANET was an important

predecessor to the Internet. It is the network that

demonstrated to the world that large scale packet

switching would be a feasible form of computer

communications technology. Describing the

ARPANET’s contribution to the development of the

Internet, Robert Kahn, co-inventor of the TCP/IP

protocol explains: “The ARPANET was helpful in

that it demonstrated the power of networking even

though for a single network and community. The

kinds of things that happened there, happen in all

kinds of networks and communities. It also showed

the importance of protocols and introduced an exam-

ple of protocol layering (e.g. FTP on top of NCP on

top of the communication subnet.)” (Kahn, E-mail,

September 15, 2002.) This new technology made

possible the resource sharing of human and computer

resources.

This background helps to understand the

origins of the Internet.

The history of the ARPANET and of packet

switching, however, is not the history of the Internet.

The ARPANET was a single network that linked

heterogeneous computer systems into a resource

sharing network, first within the U.S., and eventually

it had tentacles to computer systems in other coun-

tries.

The ARPANET also supported the sharing of

human resources and enabled people to interact. But

the computer systems had to meet certain require-

ments, including permission from the U.S. govern-

ment to connect to the ARPANET. The history of the

ARPANET is the history of some of the foundations

for the Internet. But it is not the history of the

Internet. “What the ARPANET didn’t address,” Kahn

clarifies, “was the issue of interconnecting multiple

networks and all the attendant issues that raised.”

(Kahn, E-mail, September 15, 2002)

Page 6

II - Purpose

This paper is a beginning study of the origins,

international in scope, of the Internet, and of the

technology that made the Internet possible. This was

the development of the TCP/IP protocol. The purpose

of the paper is three fold. The first is to distinguish

between the ARPANET and the Internet. In order to

look at the origins and development of the Internet,

it is important to recognize that the Internet is the

solution to the multiple network problem, whereas

the ARPANET and other packet switching networks

were the solution to an earlier problem: the problem

of communication among dissimilar computers and

operating systems.

Second, this paper documents the international

collaboration and participation to create and develop

the Internet that could span national borders and

interconnect the computer communications networks

of different countries. This collaboration involved the

U.S., Norway and the U.K. and researchers from

France and then Germany and Italy, at different

stages in the process. Creating an Internet was a

difficult problem to solve, not only theoretically, but

practically as well. To understand the nature of the

Internet, it is necessary to understand the multiple

network problem and how it was solved. The difficul-

ties were not only technical. Describing some of the

difficulty he encountered, a British Internet pioneer,

Peter Kirstein writes, “I was certainly ordered, in

1976, to stop work on the Internet Protocol but to

concentrate only on European developments. I

refused, and pursued several alternate paths for at

least another decade.” (Kirstein, E-mail, October 4,

2002.)

Third, a central aspect in the development of the

Internet is the vision that inspired and provided the

glue for the international collaborative research

efforts. To explore the nature and origin of this vision

helps to understand the research processes creating

the TCP/IP protocol.

III - Packet Switching Networks

Early research efforts to develop a way of

transporting computer data led to the development of

what is called “packet switching.” Packet switching

technology breaks a message into small sections of

data, gives each of these addressing information

called a header, which together with the data are

called “packets.” It then routes and delivers the

packets, interspersed with other packets from other

messages. After the packets reach their destination,

the message is reconstructed. Paul Baran in the U.S.

and a few years later, and unaware of Baran’s work,

Donald Davies in the U.K., developed similar con-

cepts. In 1966 Davies implemented a packet switch

connecting a set of host computers. Paal Spilling, a

Norwegian Internet pioneer, refers to the resulting

National Physical Laboratory (NPL) network as the

first packet switching local area hub network. (Spill-

ing, E-mail, August 2002)

In the U.S., there was interest in exploring the

feasibility of packet switching for resource sharing

computer networks. This interest led the Advanced

Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to recruit Larry

Roberts, a researcher at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories

to join the Information Processing Techniques Office

(IPTO). IPTO was planning to establish a packet

switching network interconnecting a number of

geographically dispersed dissimilar computers.

Networking technology was also of interest to

other researchers around the world. In the early 1970s

in France, Louis Pouzin was developing a French

packet switching network, building on the lessons

learned from previous packet switching research. He

studied the research developments in the U.S. and

Great Britain, and along with his research group,

created the Cyclades/Cigale network. In the U.K., the

NPL network was being developed by a research

group headed by Donald Davies. In the U.S., there

was the ARPANET development. The question

became how could these networks be interconnected,

i.e. how would communication be possible across the

boundaries of these dissimilar networks. (Ronda

Hauben, “The Birth of the Internet”)

A plan at the time was to connect the ARPANET

in the U.S., CYCLADES, in France and NPL in

Great Britain. A memo written in 1973 describing

early technical plans for this interconnection, in-

cluded a diagram of these three networks linked by

gateways. These gateways would make it possible to

transmit messages across the boundaries of different

constituent networks. Following is a replica of the

diagram (Cerf, Memo, p. 5. See Also Graphic I):

Page 7

(Host)

( ) ( ) ( )

(Host)--(CYCLADES)--(gateway)--( ARPA )--(gateway)--( NPL )

( ) ( ) ( )

(Host)

Also there was a diagram of data going from a host

computer on one computer network to a gateway and

then to a host on another computer network.

(H)----(G)----(G)---(H)

\ /

(H)

Another description of the goal of connecting

these 3 different networks, is presented at the Interna-

tional Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

(IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, in 1974. In a paper

for a conference there, British researcher, Donald

Davies writes: “To achieve... the interconnection of

packet switching systems we have to decide at what

level they will interwork. The levels chosen could be

character stream, packet transport or the virtual

circuit. After some discussion, a group including

ARPA, NPL, and CYCLADES is trying out a scheme

of interconnection based on a packet transport net-

work with an agreed protocol for message trans-

port....” (Davies, “The Future of Computer Net-

works,” IIASA Conference on Computer Communica-

tions Networks, October 21-25, 1974, p. 36)

Davies’ paper is helpful in documenting the

interest in creating a meta-network of other networks

including the ARPANET, NPL and CYCLADES.

Also, however, the occasion of the paper is signifi-

cant. The IIASA is a research institute which sup-

ported collaboration among researchers from the

Soviet Union and Eastern European countries and

from the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. The

conference in 1974 at which Davies spoke was a

conference where researchers from these different

countries were all introduced to networking technolo-

gies and developments of the time, including the

ARPANET, NPL and CYCLADES developments.

At a workshop the following year in Laxenburg,

in 1975, sponsored jointly by the IIASA and also the

International Federation of Information Processing

Organizations (IFIP), another British researcher,

Peter Kirstein presented a paper that described the

collaboration between the U.K. and the U.S. in net-

working. The paper included a diagram of the satel-

lite and ground connectivity between the ARPANET

in the U.S. and the University College London,

(UCL) computers in U.K. The diagram also showed

the Norwegian connection to the U.S. and U.K. net-

works. Kirstein’s paper, “The Uses of the ARPA

Network via the University College London Node”

was reported to have been exciting to those present

and plans for a network connecting the researchers of

the IIASA were developed. The list of those at this

workshop included researchers from Austria, Bel-

gium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the

German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Italy,

Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, the Soviet Union,

the U.K., and the U.S. Davies and Kirstein were there

from the U.K., Cerf from the U.S., Lazzori from

Italy. Kopetz from Austria, K. Fuchs-Kittowski from

the Germany Democratic Republic. Also there was

discussion at the workshop about what kind of

network researchers the IIASA would develop to

support their collaboration.

The IIASA conference in 1974 and the workshop

in 1975 include reports on the networking research

being done to create the Internet and other networks

like the European Informatics Network (EIN). It is

significant that at a group including researchers from

both Eastern Europe, the U.S. and Western Europe,

the details of the internetworking developments were

presented and discussed. Fuchs-Kittowski, a re-

searcher from the GDR present at the 1975 work-

shop, remembers discussing possible participation in

the UCL network in the U.K. by those from the

German Democratic Republic. (See for example,

Graphic III) There is at least one discussion in 1976

about whether or not to have an IIASA connection to

the ARPANET or to the EIN. There was also interna-

tional collaboration as part of the IFIP 6.1 working

group toward the development of the Internet.

There are various streams of research that made

contributions to the development of the Internet. The

researchers in France developing Cyclades/Cigale

contributed the important concept of the datagram as

a means of transporting data. Pouzin also is credited

with the creation of the sliding window as a flow

control mechanism.

There were discussions among

those participating in the INWG, later called IFIP,

WG 6.1, where decisions were considered about what

the standards should be to create the protocol for an

Page 8

Internet. For example, Pouzin describes some of the

meetings: “Within INWG, which joined IFIP as WG

6.1, we had lengthy discussions about which level of

protocol should be agreed first. It must have been

during an INWG meeting on a boat (Stockholm-

Turku and return) that a consensus developed on the

principle of a common packet format. I don’t have a

record of this meeting in my diary, but I gather it was

in August 1974, at the time of an IFIP Congress.”

(Pouzin, E-mail, April 28, 2003) Pouzin was also at

the INWG 1974 conference and describes some of

the discussion there. He writes: “Yes, this was 21-24

October 1974. We kept refining a common packet

format. I had cranked up a proposal overnight during

the workshop, and I remember Peter Kirstein made

some objections after a call to Vint Cerf in the U.S.

I don’t know if this paper was recorded in history,

perhaps as an INWG note.” (Pouzin, E-mail, April

28, 2003) Describing the efforts that were made to

link Cyclades and NPL, Pouzin explains: “In the end,

there never was an interconnection based on this

plan. What occurred was a demo during an ICCC

conference in Toronto, 3-5 August 1976. There was

a Cyclades terminal concentrator (like a TIP) con-

nected to Paris with a leased phone line. There, a link

to NPL was using the packet network EIN (alias Cost

11), (if I remember). Then at NPL it was connected

to the internal local net. On the exhibit in Toronto,

Derek Barber demonstrated using an NPL host

through this patchwork. I felt it was amazing, if

rather intricate.”

“Another more elaborate attempt was the defini-

tion of a protocol subset allowing a TCP-IP host to

talk to a Cyclades host, without a gateway, simply by

using a restricted set of protocol features. This work

was carried out by Alex McKenzie from BBN. He

wrote an INWG note. Maybe someone has a copy!

Presumably, there was not enough steam, and money,

to implement the idea.” (Pouzin, E-mail, April 28,

2003)

IV - Great Britain and the U.S. Plan to

Collaborate

As early as the end of 1970, there was discussion

between American and British research groups on

how to link the U.S. and U.K. networks together. One

plan was to utilize the connection between the U.S.

and Norway connecting the NORwegian Seismic

ARray (NORSAR) near Oslo to the U.S. Describing

this discussion, Peter Kirstein of the University

College London (UCL)

writes: “In late 1970, Larry

Roberts proposed to Donald Davies that it would be

very interesting to link their two networks together.

The existence of the Washington to NORSAR line

would make it comparatively cheap to break the

connection in London and link in the NPL network.

There were two problems with this plan; first of all

we underestimated the tariff implications of adding

the extra drop-off point; secondly, the timing could

not have been worse from a British national perspec-

tive. The problem was that the British government

had just applied to join the European Community;

this made Europe good and the U.S. bad from a

governmental policy standpoint. NPL was under the

Department of Technology and Donald was quite

unable to take up Larry’s offer. He had to concentrate

on European initiatives like the European Informatics

Network (EIN). In the meantime, I had been inter-

ested in the ARPANET from the beginning; it was

therefore agreed early in 1971, that we would attempt

to set up a project link in UCL instead of NPL.”

(Kirstein, E-mail, July 3, 2002)

Through discussion between the U.K. and IPTO

researchers, an agreement was reached for a research

collaboration. Larry Roberts, according to Kirstein,

“agreed to provide a Terminal Interface Message

Processor (TIP) for the project, valued at 50,000

pounds, and to allow us to use the very expensive

existing transatlantic link. It was merely for the U.K.

to provide any manpower and travel costs needed to

complete the project, and to provide the (assumed

modest) cost of breaking the communications link in

London.... By the end of 1971, the technical proposal

was complete.” (Ibid.)

Kirstein describes how he struggled through

most of 1972 trying to get funding support from the

British government without success. “These machina-

tions,” he notes, “took most of 1972, and by the end

of that period, the situation looked hopeless. Neither

the SRC (Science Research Council) nor the DOI

(Department of Industry) would supply any finance.”

(Ibid.)

Also the situation had changed with regard to the

Washington to NORSAR link. “The Scandinavian

Tanum Earth Station in Sweden had come on-

stream,” writes Kirstein. “As a result the U.S. Nor-

way connection no longer passed through the U.K.

Hence a new 9.6 kbps link between London and

Kjeller was needed; the cost of this link was going to

be very expensive.” (Ibid.)

Page 9

Fortunately, the British Post Office (BPO) and

NPL, two British government organizations, came

through with the promise of support. Kirstein contin-

ues

: “Two senior directors of the BPO, Murray

Laver of the National Data Processing Service, and

Alec Merriman of Advanced Technology, agreed to

provide the finance for the U.K. Norway link for one

year. In addition, Donald Davies agreed to promise

the most he could sign for personally, (5000 pounds).

With these two modest contributions, I told Larry

Roberts that we would proceed.” (Ibid.)

Even with this support, however, Kirstein was

faced with a difficult working environment in the

U.K. He writes: “It would be nice, in retrospect, to

have called it a British decision; it was not. There

was grudging support, and the main research initia-

tives were in pursuit of the X.25 protocol suite and its

upper levels. There was almost no European activity

on the Internet Protocols outside Oslo and UCL.”

(Kirstein, E-mail, October 4, 2002)

V - U.S. and Norwegian Collaboration

is Arranged

While these negotiations between UCL and

IPTO were ongoing, IPTO invited Norwegian re-

searchers to collaborate on resource sharing network

research. After an invitation to the Norwegian Tele-

communications Administration (NTA) did not

generate interest, the IPTO extended an invitation to

the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment

(NDRE, “Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt”).

NDRE welcomed the proposed collaboration.

According to Yngvar Lundh, one of the Internet

pioneers in Norway, NDRE’s interest in basic com-

puting and networking research was the reason for

the Norwegian collaboration with IPTO.

On September 18, 1972, Larry Roberts and

Robert (Bob) Kahn visited Norway, meeting with

Lundh, then a research engineer at NDRE, Finn Lied,

the director of NDRE, and Karl Holberg, the research

superintendent of the NDRE electronics department.

(Lundh, E-mail, April 24, 2002) Lundh had met

Roberts several years earlier during Lundh’s sabbati-

cal in 1958-9 as a visiting researcher. He was at

MIT’s Electronics Systems Lab where Roberts was

a graduate student finishing up his PhD. They were

both using the TX-0.

Lundh recalls that the meeting with the visitors

from IPTO was held in Oslo at a civilian research

administrative office at the Royal Norwegian Council

for Scientific and Industrial Research. Also at the

meeting were representatives from other Norwegian

organizations. (Lundh, E-mail, April 26, 2002.) In a

history in Norwegian of the role of Norway in early

Internet development, Gisle Hannemyr writes that

Lundh saw the collaboration with IPTO as “an

opportunity to further advance data communication

research in Norway.” (Hannemyr, E-mail, his

translation)

Roberts and Kahn invited NDRE to collaborate

and recommended they send researchers to the first

International Computer Communications Conference

(ICCC’72) planned for October 1972 in Washington,

DC. There was to be a demonstration of the resource

sharing packet switching network that was being

developed in the U.S. Describing the importance of

this event, Donald Davies writes: “The meeting at the

Washington Hilton in 1972 was quite the most

important and influential conference I have ever

attended.... I arrived at the Hilton Hotel early to see

what was happening and met an extraordinary scene.

On a podium was ‘Terminal IMP’ or TIP...joined to

the existing ARPA network, surrounded by many

terminal devices of all kinds.”

“The astounding thing was a crowd of young,

enthusiastic researchers who were rushing around or

huddled in earnest discussions trying to get every-

thing to work. Listening to their conversation we

heard all that we had been trying to promote for the

previous 5 years being talked about as self evident –

a new and strange experience. Most of all, one had

the impression of a great amount of intellectual effort

now being applied to computer networking, which

must grow in importance.”

“It was a complete turn-around, seemingly in one

day, though in fact it was the enormous efforts of the

ARPA team that achieved this demonstration and

caused the revolutionary change in thinking about

networks.”

“It completely changed attitudes to computer

communications. Yet, many of the ideas it fostered

had been talked about for five years or more. What

happened in Washington was that people could now

see these ideas in the form of practical achievements.

They could get a glimpse of the intellectual impact

that networks were destined to produce.” (Donald W.

Davies, “Early Thoughts on Computer Communica-

tions”)

Lundh writes that he attended the ICCC confer-

ence on October 25 and 26, 1972. While at the

Page 10

demonstration, he was invited to attend a meeting

with other networking researchers from around the

world held after the ICCC’72 at the Comsat Corpora-

tion (at L’Enfant Plaza). He writes that this meeting

“may well have been the first Internet meeting.”

(Lundh, E-mail April 26, 2002) This was also the

meeting where the International Network Working

Group(INWG) was created. Lundh reports that at the

meeting at Comsat, “The discussion(s) were in rather

general terms as I recall, and mainly clarifying

reasons for establishing a net of nets where each

individual net would use the best low level protocol

for utilizing the respective transmission. He estimates

that there were 10-15 people there that day. Certainly

Bob Kahn and most likely Dick Binder from BBN.”

(Lundh, E-mail, June 24, 2002) Kirstein notes that he

was there. Cerf adds that he was there, along with

Steve Crocker from ARPA, Louis Pouzin, Gesualdo

Lemoli, Roger Scantlebury and perhaps Donald

Davies. Also Kirstein presented a paper at the

ICCC’72 conference.

Although the research proposed by IPTO was

new to him, Lundh found “the ideas interesting and

accepted the invitation to participate in the develop-

ment.” (Lundh, E-mail, April 9, 2002) To actively

participate in the research, he built “a small group of

researchers which became one of ten groups which

took part in basic Internet research during a ten year

period from 1972.” (Lundh, E-mail, April 9, 2002)

He was frustrated, however, trying to muster re-

sources and was hoping for some assistance from

ARPA. But he also realized that it was difficult for

IPTO to help fund the Norwegian researchers.

(Lundh, E-mail, July 12, 2002)

Lundh reports, “I had no financial support in the

beginning, but I formalized a small ‘job’ called

‘Radio Data Systems-RADA’ at NDRE with the

purpose (of) fitting in with ARPA’s resource sharing

(research).” In the beginning of the collaboration,

Lundh had to support the travel and the research he

did in his spare time with other projects he was

working on. For the first few years, he recalls, he had

help from two graduate students whose thesis work

he was supervising.

The ARPANET TIP was not put at NDRE which

was in a military area with restricted, and thus,

limited access. Instead it was placed in NORSAR’s

building which was on the other side of the fence

from NDRE. Lundh explains that “seismic array

technology or test detection was not NDRE’s reason

for placing the NDRE TIP at NORSAR.

It was a

practical arrangement for us, and probably a conve-

nient arrangement for ARPA too.” (Lundh, E-mail,

April 18, 2002) The TIP at NORSAR was thus at a

civilian facility, providing access for more wide-

spread Norwegian participation in networking re-

search and facilitating academic collaboration in

networking.(Lundh, E-mail, April 18, 2002)

A problem the Norwegian group faced, accord-

ing to Lundh, was that it was difficult to build a

research team given the lack of funding. “It was hard

to convince Norwegian financing sources of the

importance of computer networking,” Lundh writes.

(Lundh, 18) He was excited by the concept of re-

source sharing. “My reasons for wanting to partici-

pate were that I intuitively thought the possibilities of

resource sharing were fantastic.” Lundh elaborates, “I

saw ‘resource sharing’ as (providing -ed) interesting

possibilities in several ‘dimensions’, resources being

expensive programs, special data, ideas, people with

various interests and capabilities, etc.” (Lundh, E-

mail, July 12, 2002) Despite these funding difficul-

ties, the Norwegian research group made an impor-

tant contribution to the development of TCP/IP and

the Internet.

VI - How to Communicate Across Net-

work Boundaries?

Shortly after the successful ICCC’72 conference,

Bob Kahn left his job at Bolt Beranek and Newman

(BBN) and went to work at IPTO. Joining IPTO as a

program manager, Kahn initiated certain projects and

also took over responsibility for one that had already

been funded. A new initiative was to create a ground

based packet radio network. An existing initiative

was to create a satellite-based packet switching

network. (Ronda Hauben, “The Birth of the Internet,”

The ground packet radio network would be of

particular interest to the U.S. Department of Defense

(DoD), as it would make packet switching computer

networks possible in otherwise difficult to reach areas

or conditions. Kahn’s objective was to create a

multinode ground packet radio network (PRNET)

where each node could be mobile. In parallel, he

sought to create a packet satellite network (SATNET)

utilizing INTELSAT satellites.

The goal of the

packet satellite network research was to make re-

source sharing computer communications networking

possible with different European sites. Two of the

Page 11

networks (PRNET and SATNET) would use radio

transmission and the third network which already

existed (ARPANET) used shared point to point

leased lines from the telephone company. Though

Kahn originally considered the possibility of seeking

changes to each of the constituent networks to solve

the multiple network problem, he soon recognized

the advantage of an architecture that would directly

accommodate a diversity of networks. To join an

existing network like the ARPANET would require

another network to become a component of it. Kahn

conceived that there was a need for an architectural

conception that would allow the communicating

networks to function as peers of each other, rather

than requiring that any one become a component of

another. He saw there was a need to design an

architecture that would be open to all networks, an

architecture that Kahn called “open architecture”.

VII - Designing Protocols and Specifi-

cations for an Internet

Once at IPTO, Kahn invited Vinton (Vint) Cerf

to collaborate with him. Kahn wanted to design an

open architecture protocol and needed Cerf’s knowl-

edge of computer operating systems to do it. Other

researchers were also interested. For example, at an

INWG meeting in June, 1973, in New York City,

Kahn and Cerf were joined by E. Aupperle, R.

Metcalfe, R. Scantlebury, D. Walden and H.

Zimmerman. Scantlebury was from the U.K. and

Zimmerman, from France. Others listed were mem-

bers of the U.S. network research community. The

document also credits G. Grossman and G. LeLann

for contributing after the meeting. LeLann was from

France. (INWG note #39 NIC # 18764, dated 9-13-

73). Cerf explains that LeLann worked with Louis

Pouzin at IRIA (now INRIA) and “spent 6 months

working with me and others on the design of the

Internet’s TCP protocol.” (Cerf, E-mail, April 13,

2003) Pouzin also remembers a June 1973 INWG

meeting, noting that it was quite hot in NYC.

(Pouzin, E-mail, April 28, 2003)

The INWG note #39 is a draft paper that Kahn

and Cerf prepared for presentation at the September

16, 1973 INWG meeting in Brighton, England. A

revised draft of the paper was published in May,

1974, titled “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercom-

munication” in the IEEE Transactions on Communi-

cations. The paper describes the philosophy and

design for the TCP/IP protocol, though the original

paper called the protocol TCP, as the IP function was

originally embedded in TCP.

After designing a protocol, there is a need to

write specifications to implement the design.

16a

Cerf

refers to the development of two versions of the

specifications for TCP developed at Stanford Univer-

sity, one in December 1974 and a second in March

1977. Subsequently two further specifications were

developed with other groups.(Cerf) Among the

names of those working on the initial specifications

for TCP, Cerf lists U.S. researchers or graduate

students including Y. Dalal, C. Sunshine, R. Karp, J.

Estrin, and J. Mathis, at Stanford; R. Tomlinson and

W. Plummer, at BBN; R. Metcalfe, D. Boggs, and

John Schoch, at Xerox PARC. He also lists several

researchers from the U.K., from UCL, F. Deignan, C.

.J Bennett, A. .J Hinchley and M. Gallard. Cerf also

thanks G. LeLann from the University of Rennes,

France. Cerf writes that Dag Belsnes, from the

University of Oslo, Norway provided “additional

philosophical leavening which influenced the design

of the protocol.”(Cerf, The Final Report, IEN 151, 2)

When asked what he thought the term “philo-

sophical leavening referred to,” Belsnes responded,

“I also wonder what ‘philosophical leavening’ is

referring to. Perhaps that I always like to discuss and

establish some understanding of problems.”

In 1973, Belsnes received a one year grant from

the Norwegian Research Council. After meeting Vint

Cerf at a conference in England in 1973, Belsnes

contacted Cerf and was accepted to be part of the

research effort at the Digital System Laboratory at

Stanford University. “I got the opportunity,” Belsnes

writes, “to participate in his Protocol Design Group

that worked on creating a specification for the

Internet Transmission Control Program.” Belsnes

explains that among his main interests were “protocol

correctness and flow congestion control.” (Belsnes,

E-mail, June 17, 2002)

Creating a design and then specifications for the

development of a protocol for internetworking is a

significant step. It is, however, part of a larger re-

search process. Elaborating on the value of the

experimental work, Paal Spilling, another of the

Norwegian Internet pioneers, writes: “A group at

Stanford University (SU) specified in detail a control

program ... the Transmission Control Program (TCP)

allowing computers in different inter-connected

networks to communicate.... Although the TCP was

specified in detail, it had to be considered as a first

Page 12

approach towards making a reliable process-to-

process communication tool in an internetwork

environment. Experience showed that this was the

case.... The results obtained, helped in the debugging

of this first version of the TCP, and uncovered some

deficiencies in its design. Some of these could be

taken care of rather easily, while others were subjects

for further investigations.” (Spilling, Proposal to

NATO)

Kahn had recognized the need to include at least

three different kinds of packet switching networks to

test if the protocol created for intercommunication

among dissimilar networks would be adequate. If a

prototype has only two different entities, it is difficult

to tell what is particular about each and what is

general about the two. With three or more dissimilar

networks as part of a prototype, it is possible to

identify what is general to them all despite the

dissimilar nature of each.

In June 1973, a TIP was installed at Kjeller,

Norway for the NDRE researchers. By the end of

July 1973, the UCL TIP in the U.K. was also passing

packets between the U.S. and U.K. These packets

went from the U.S. via satellite to the Tanum Earth

Station in Sweden, via land and underwater lines to

NORSAR in Sylvia, Norway, and then to London in

the U.K. Kirstein and Kenny provide a diagram of the

relation between the U.K. TIP, the Norwegian TIP

and the U.S. ARPANET.

Kirstein writes that one of the significant activi-

ties in the early work to develop the Internet was “an

early protocol experiment in late 1974 between a

junior assistant professor at Stanford (Vint Cerf) and

a visiting scholar from Norway at UCL (Paal Spill-

ing) of the Proposed Transmission Control Protocol.”

Spilling, visiting UCL from NDRE, worked with

Kirstein’s research group. Judy Estrin was a graduate

student working with Vint Cerf at Stanford. Estrin

and Spilling “did what was probably the first TCP

tests with each other. They were independent imple-

mentations,” Kirstein explains. (Kirstein, E-mail,

May 20, 2002.) Describing this research, Spilling

elaborates, “As I remember the fellows at the Stan-

ford side may have been Judy Estrin and Jim Mathis.

At the UCL side were Frank Deignan, Andrew

Hinchley and me. Frank was the implementer. It was

extremely exciting to observe packets coming from

Stanford and after an initial debugging being ac-

cepted and processed by Frank’s implementation of

TCP. One critical problem I can remember was that

the TCP checksum was applied slightly differently at

Stanford and at UCL.” (Spilling, E-mail, August 1,

2002)

Kirstein describes how the British government

became more supportative of his research by 1975.

He writes: “The British authorities became increas-

ingly positive from 1975. I had set up a management

committee to oversee the use of the ARPAnet link.

This included representatives from the British Post

Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Science Re-

search Council and the Department of Industry. They

had to approve all requests for usage. From 1976,

there was increasing pressure for using the emerging

X.25 infrastructure (International Packet Switched

Service – IPSS) as an alternative to SATNET. First

this involved a commercial 9.6 Kbps line from about

1978 between UCL and BBN; here it was necessary

to arrange the link so that no commercial charges

would arise to BBN and DARPA. Later, I think it

was around 1980, a 64 Kbps IPSS link was provided

also free of charge by the British Post Office. This

link existed until around 1984, and allowed much

fuller research into multiple routes with different

capacity, charging and access control considerations.

The IPSS link was always using IP; for this reason

the multiple use of the commercial use and SATNET

was an important landmark into the use of intercon-

nected networks. It was their existence which al-

lowed UCL to adopt a phased approach to the adop-

tion of the Internet Protocol. We first proved it on the

IPSS link without affecting NCP traffic on SATNET;

this needed NCP-TCP relays at UCL and BBN. We

could then move it onto SATNET, without impacting

too drastically our service traffic – which could use

the IPSS route in an emergency. Finally, when the

ARPANET had moved to Internet Protocols, we

could abandon our relays in BBN and also leave

SATNET; all the traffic could use IP/X.25 over IPSS.

It is the phased nature of this transition which ex-

plains why UCL finally left SATNET (see below)

after the Norwegians – though they used IP for

service traffic much earlier.”

“By the time we got to around 1983, complete

alternate mail nets, like UUCP and BITNET started

coming into being. The various gateways these

provided gave a much richer topology. When the

DNS was added, its impact on the international

infrastructure was not realised at first. When we

introduced blocking on some of our IPSS routes, we

suddenly realised the magnitude of international

Page 13

traffic that was passing over the U.K.-U.S. routes

originating from these other networks. It was then

that the work on peering and service agreements took

on a new urgency for these data networks.” (Kirstein,

E-mail, October 8, 2002)

VIII - Early Norwegian Internet

Research Challenges

During its earliest stage, Lundh’s research group

consisted of his 2 graduate students and himself. By

1974 he was able to get Paal Spilling assigned to his

group, Spilling had a PhD in nuclear physics and was

interested in the networking project. Subsequently

other qualified engineers were assigned by NDRE to

the research group. Lundh describes the change

Spilling’s participation made in the NDRE research

group. He writes (Lundh, E-mail, June 12, 2002)

“Paal Spilling came to my group in 1974.... I re-

cruited him from one of my colleague’s group(s) at

NDRE where he had become superfluous. At that

time I had good contact with people in PSP and

INWG. I participated in their meetings and knew

Peter Kirstein. They were all delighted that I finally

got someone beside me. And - as I recall - Peter

offered to have him at UCL for a couple of months to

give a flying start, which was very good and useful

indeed. Paal soon got the whole networking business

‘under his skin’ and after that participated together

with me in all the meetings. He soon became the

main contributor to the networking effort at NDRE,

for some time being the only one who spent full time

in it.”

Lundh emphasizes that the continual invitation

to the Norwegian Telecommunications Administra-

tion Research Establishment (NTA-RE) to participate

in the research led to “the free loan for experimental

purposes of a spare channel in the INTELSAT IV

satellite and a spare line between NDRE and the

existing Scandinavian Satellite Earth Station at

Tanum, Sweden. This permission was obtained in

1975 permitting the SIMP - Satellite IMP - to be

installed at the Tanum Station in mid 1975. From

then on SATNET had three ground stations permit-

ting experiments involving contentious traffic situa-

tions. Mario Gerla in Leonard Kleinrock’s group at

UCLA was very active in the SATNET studies which

eventually resulted in the CPODA-protocol for

Contention Priority Oriented Demand Access.”

(Lundh) According to Lundh, other researchers in

Norway were not eager to use the NORSAR TIP

during the 1970s. But interest was expressed by the

staff at NORSAR in utilizing the ARPANET as an

alternative to the channel they had for exchanging

seismic data with the U.S. Lundh notes that “Com-

mercial traffic was prohibited in the Arpanet from the

outset and that was still the rule as the network

changed into the Internet. The network was an

experimental facility supported for research pur-

poses.”(Lundh, 18)

IX - Creating an Internet

The protocol suite that makes the Internet possi-

ble is known as the TCP/IP protocol suite (Transmis-

sion Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Lundh

explains the extensive effort needed to transform the

design into functioning protocol specifications. He

describes the years of experiments, analysis of the

results, and the design of new experiments to test the

theory developed from the experimental process.

Failures or surprises from the actual experience of the

researchers helped them to make the needed changes

in the implementation efforts. Lundh writes: “Those

protocols resulted from an extremely thorough

analysis and design. ‘No stone was left unturned’

during the development which took several years.

Theoretical analyses were complemented by experi-

ments. Combinations of traffic types and require-

ments, network topologies and application types were

imagined, tried, failed, changed and tried again. The

‘final’ TCP and IP were not easily postulated and

approved. Nobody can ever reproduce in a laboratory

the chaotic traffic pattern of a lively telecom or

computing network and even less the diverse de-

mands of information exchange. The growing active

dynamic traffic situation in the ARPANET prevailed

during onwards development of its own underlying

technology. That may be one reason for the robust-

ness, elegance and survivability of the result.”

(Lundh, 12)

Lundh emphasizes the importance of a functional

network with actual users and traffic as a laboratory

for the researchers. He describes how theory grew out

of experimental research and then was used to guide

the experimental process. In this way, the theory was

verified or modified.

Recalling his experience, Lundh writes, “During

a period of intensively active development, methods

were conceived and perfected until functioning well

in an environment which was closer to reality than

anyone might have dreamt up in a ‘sterile’ labora-

Page 14

tory.” This experimental process was closely inter-

twined with theoretical development. He adds: “At

the same time a profound theoretical understanding

was developed. It kept its scrutiny on experimental

results and was both guiding and following up the

work in an admirable teamwork.” (Lundh, 12)

Describing the political conditions that had to be

accommodated to create a protocol that would

function for the international community, Spilling

explains the rationale of the TCP design: “In order to

allow Host computers, connected to different net-

works to communicate, these networks have to be

interconnected. This is not a trivial matter, since

different networks, in general, are supported by

organizations with different requirements and there-

fore will develop differently. Any changes in existing

networks in order to interconnect these, will be costly

and impeded by political factors. The obvious ap-

proach therefore, would be to leave the local nets

undisturbed and to perform the interconnections

outside them. This is one of the main ideas behind the

TCP.” (Spilling, Proposal to Nato, 5)

The protocol requirements were such that the

networks participating in the Internet would not be

limited in their internal development or activities.

The use of gateway computers helped in this process.

Gateway computers would reformat the packets of

data from the form needed by one network into the

form to meet the requirements of the next network on

their journey to their final destination. The gateway

software would also determine the best next path for

the packets of data to take to get to their destination.

Spilling explains that when Host 1 (on Net 1)

wants to exchange data with Host 2 (on Net 2), it

forms the data into Internet packets according to the

TCP format and encloses them in the format required

by Net 1. This action, he says, is called “wrapping.”

(Spilling, Proposal to Nato, 6) Spilling attributes the

term “wrapping” to an article by Louis Pouzin and H.

Zimmerman. Internet packets are then transported to

the gateway where they are unwrapped from the Net

1 format and rewrapped in the format for Net 2 for

transmission to Host 2 (on Net 2).

X - 1970s Networking Collaboration to

Develop Internet Technology

Critical to the scientific process of the develop-

ment of the TCP protocol was the international

collaboration of researchers working together on its

development. Describing the role of this collabora-

tion, Lundh writes: “(T)he network technology was

further refined and developed in an intimate co-

operation of ten research groups during the 1970s.

That co-operation resulted in the technology underly-

ing today’s Internet.” (Lundh, 10)

The results were documented and made openly

available to anyone around the world, particularly to

academic researchers. The period from 1973 to 1980

was a significant period in the research to develop the

Internet. For Lundh, the Internet is the networking of

interconnected nets. “From the initial ARPANET,”

he writes, “the technology was developed into a

basically new computer cooperating technology –

Internetworking technology. Its main constituents

were defined as proposed standards around 1980.”

(Lundh, 10) Further important technical refinements

and geographical expansion occurred in the 1980s.

This development was done on a non-commer-

cial research basis. The earliest ARPANET develop-

ment was done on the basis of leased telephone lines.

The research in the mid to late 1970s and into the

1980s, however, included research on Ethernet,

packet radio and packet satellite forms of communi-

cation. Lundh points out that not only was the

ARPANET a laboratory, it was at the same time “an

active telecom network, a resource sharing network

and a forum of creative and critical people.”(Lundh,

12)

Lundh cites an experiment where three people

were located in different geographical locations,

Boston, MA in the U.S., London, England, and

Kjeller, Norway. They held a demonstration confer-

ence using speech, which was observed by other

researchers in a meeting at another ARPANET-TIP

international site, at University College London

(UCL). Lundh writes: “Each of the three sites...

communicated through local area nets interconnected

through gateways via ARPANET and SATNET. The

packet traffic in that Internet situation (new then!)

was a combination of that speech traffic together with

‘natural’ traffic in the Arpanet at the time.” (Lundh,

13)

Lundh calls this experiment in 1978, “one of the

several major milestones during development of

Internet technology.” He also emphasizes that not

only did the Internet research result in important and

robust standards, but it also influenced and actually

pioneered a new methodology for developing tele-

communication standards. (Lundh, 13)

According to Lundh, ten groups collaborated on

Page 15

developing the TCP/IP protocols. The whole team, he

explains, referred to itself as the “Packet Switching

Protocols Working Group - PSPWG.” Eight of the

groups were in the USA, one in England and a small

group in Norway. “The development comprised

investigation of a variety of suggested methods. They

were thoroughly studied theoretically and experimen-

tally.” (Lundh, 13)

Kirstein adds that in phases of

the SATNET research, there were researchers from

Germany and Italy involved and there were also

meetings at their sites.

Communication via e-mail helped the research,

along with in-person meetings held every three

months that people from each group attended. Lundh

credits DARPA/IPTO with providing the leadership

and much of the funding for the work. The research,

he emphasizes, “had the main purpose to study and

develop resource-sharing networks.” (Lundh, 14)

The resources to be shared were the ‘power’ of

the computers, programs and data of various types.

The human users were also seen as a significant

resource. “Further, and not least,” writes Lundh, “it

was important to create an environment where human

resources could co-operate and strengthen creativity

and knowledge.” (Lundh, 14)

Lundh lists ten of the research groups that

collaborated on Internet research in the 1970s.

(Lundh, 16)

1. ARPA in Washington, DC, USA; Advanced

Research Projects Agency - Information Processing

Techniques Office

2. BBN in Cambridge, MA, USA; Bolt Beranek and

Newman

3. SRI in Menlo Park, CA, USA; Stanford Research

International

4. UCLA in Los Angeles, CA, USA; University of

California

5. ISI in Marina del Rey, CA, USA; Information

Sciences Institute

6. Linkabit in San Diego, CA, USA; Linkabit

Corporation

7. Comsat in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA; Comsat

Corporation

8. MIT in Cambridge, MA, USA; Massachusetts

Institute of Technology

9. UCL in London, England; University College

London

10. NDRE in Kjeller, Norway; Norwegian Defence

Research Establishment

“The tone was open and could be heated al-

though always friendly. A certain amount of social

occasions usually took place and stimulated the

smooth co-operative spirit. ... The assembled group,”

Lundh explains, “constituted a strong and inspiring

research team.” (Lundh, 17) When not assembled,

“from day to day the researchers exchanged e-mail.

It comprised of discussions, experimental results,

comments and programs.” (Lundh, 17) From 1977,

the usual 2 day PSPWG was “supplemented,” by a

third day “Internet meeting dedicated to techniques

for internet-working of different nets.” (Lundh, 17)

Also see Appendix.

Following is a list Lundh provides of some of the

rotation of meetings. These were meetings between

August 1974 and February 1978. (Lundh, 17):

10-11 Aug 74 On the ferry between Stockholm,

Sweden and Abo, Finland

4-5 Sep 75 Linkabit Co, San Diego, California;

Host: Irwin Jacobs

12-13 Nov 75 UCL, London, England; Host: Peter

Kirstein

12-14 Feb 76 DCA and ARPA, Washington, DC.;

Host: Bob Kahn

29-30 Apr 76 BBN, Cambridge, Massachusetts;

Host: David Walden

29-30 Jun 76 NDRE, Kjeller, Norway; Host:

Yngvar Lundh

23-24 Sep 76 UCLA, Los Angeles, California; Host:

Leonard Kleinrock

9-10 Dec 76 UCL, London, England; Host: Peter

Kirstein

10-11 Mar 77 Comsat, Washington, DC; Host: Estil

Hoversten

8-10 Jun 77 NDRE, Kjeller, Norway; Host: Yngvar

Lundh

17-19 Aug 77 Linkabit, San Diego, California;

Host: Irwin Jacobs

31 Oct-2 Nov 77 BBN, Cambridge, MA; Host: Bob

Page 16

Bressler

1-3 Feb 78 UCLA, Los Angeles, California; Host:

Wesley Chu

Dave Mills, who worked at COMSAT, as chief

architect for the Internet from 1977–1982, adds that

there were several meetings after the ones Lundh

lists, at least until January 1, 1983 when ARPANET

computers were officially to change to the TCP/IP

protocol. The actual Internet coming out party, Mills

writes was at the NCC in 1979. (Mills, E-mail, April

28, 2003)

The original vision of resource sharing network-

ing was an important source of inspiration for

Internet development. Included in this resource

sharing were technical resources, and even more

significantly, the sharing of human resources, ideas

and suggestions. (Lundh, 10)

XI - The Vision

Spilling credits J. C. R. Licklider with the vision

that inspired the Internet developments. “Dr.

Licklider, educated both in electrical engineering and

psychology, had the vision of ‘an on-line community

of people,’ where the computers should help people

to communicate and provide support for the human

decision processes....” (Spilling, The Internet)

The vision Licklider proposed was of an “inter-

galactic network.” This was to be a human computer

communications networking utility which would

function like other utilities in that everyone would

have access to it. However, this was to be global and

to make it possible for governments, scientists and

people around the world to communicate in a way

that was unprecedented. Licklider’s vision was of an

on-line community of people. Computers would help

humans to communicate with each other. This vision

inspired the early development of the Internet.

It is

articulated in diverse forms through this formative

period of the Internet’s development. For example, an

editorial in the ARPANET News in February, 1974

explains: “Inherent in the concept of a resource

sharing computer network is the idea of a coopera-

tive, collaborative working mode. This calls for a

very special ‘place for people’s heads’ – a special

ability to be cognizant of and concerned for the

welfare of the whole. This long-term objective and

viewpoint requires a personal feeling of responsibil-

ity for the welfare of the network instead of the short-

sightedness of acquisitive self-interest.... With the

backing of ARPA-IPT in this endeavor... the

ARPANET shows every promise of becoming the

global tool for enhanced communication and under-

standing between nations and their scientists and

people that was envisioned for it in its beginning.”

The ARPANET News editorial suggests that the

ARPANET can be an international network. The

researchers developing this worldwide networking

system, though, recognized the need for something

different from a centralized single network like the

ARPANET. Networks like Cyclades in France, NPL

in Great Britain, and the ARPANET in the U.S. were

under the control of different national governments

and were developing in different technical ways

suited to the needs of the political and administrative

entities they belonged to. This was the problem posed

for networking researchers of the early 1970s. An

international collaboration made it possible to solve

the problem of interconnecting dissimilar packet

switching networks to make communication possible

across their boundaries. Lundh also credits Douglas

Engelbart with contributing to the vision of resource

sharing.

While Licklider formulated the vision which

inspired networking research, Lundh points to Kahn’s

role in providing an overall direction toward realizing

this vision. Lundh writes that “more than anybody

else Kahn was the person who formulated goals and

guided development of the Internet technology

during the most active development period.” (Lundh,

16)

Kirstein concurs. He writes: “Others had much

to do with protocol design and implementation detail,

Kahn had the overall research goals and direction. He

was personally responsible for formulating the

programme, and for ensuring that they followed the

right lines. Moreover, when other activities, like

those of the PTTs at the time, threatened some of the

directions of the programme, it was Kahn who

formulated activities that kept the programme on the

right lines without alienating the PTTs too much.

Thus when the British Post Office insisted on the use

of IPSS (see earlier), Kahn asked BBN to organise

things with relays at BBN in a way that would allow

those channels to be used on the U.S. side – even

though this had no real interest to him in true Internet

research.” (Kirstein, E-mail, October 8, 2002)

Kahn had worked on the BBN proposal to design

the ARPANET. He was part of the BBN team to

Page 17

create the IMP subnetwork. He was the author of the

original 1822 protocol specification for the interface

between the IMPs and Hosts for the ARPANET. He

also provided important leadership for the develop-

ment of the Internet. In an article published in No-

vember, 1972, Kahn presents both human and com-

puter interaction in information processing as a

property of resource sharing networks. He writes: “A

principal motive underlying computer network

development is to provide a convenient and economic

method for a wide variety of resources to be shared.

Such a network provides more than an increased

collection of hardware and software resources; it

affords the capability for computers as well as indi-

viduals to interact in the exchange and processing of

information.” (Kahn, “Resource Sharing,” 116)

Kahn describes how such networks encourage

participation among users. This is a cooperative

process that generates high levels of technical

achievement. He writes: “Computer networks pro-

vide a unique mechanism for increased participation

between individuals. Participation in research and

development using the distributed resources of a

computer network can lead to close cooperation

between individuals who might otherwise have little

incentive to work together. This interaction can

further cross-fertilize the network community and

encourage even higher levels of achievement through

technical cooperation.” (Kahn, “Resource Sharing,”

117)

In 1972, before the design of the TCP/IP proto-

col, Kahn proposed that “a communication system

not preclude the possibility that separate... data

networks may be accessed through it if all resources

are to be mutually accessible.” (Kahn, “Resource

Sharing,” 120)

The problem Kahn identified in his article on

resource sharing networks is the need for a means to

link the networks of different countries.

Intimately tied to the problem of communicating

across the boundaries of dissimilar packet switching

networks, was the need to support a collaborative

process to create a working protocol for an Internet.

The requirements for this protocol were that it be as

minimal as possible, asking only of the differing

networks, what was necessary for internetworking

communication. Also it was desirable to have the

internetworking process implemented outside of the

individual networks whenever possible (via gate-

ways, which were later called routers). Then the

networks, themselves, would require the least change,

if there were to be a change in the protocol.

The TCP/IP protocol suite requires the agree-

ment of the participating networks to certain gateway

and operating system specifications in the host

computers. Substantial collaborative scientific

research and experimentation were required to

develop the design and work out the implementation

problems. Utilizing the SATNET research, IPTO and

their research community, in collaboration with

research groups in Norway and the U.K., developed

and then spread a robust and functional protocol

design and implementation. Subsequently, German

and Italian researchers joined the cooperative efforts.

Meanwhile other researchers, particularly French

researchers contributed in important ways. This

created the basis for a global Internet.

In his book The Future of Ideas, Lawrence

Lessig advocates preserving the Internet’s unique

architecture and culture.

He proposes that it is the

end-to-end principle of networking architecture and

shared code that are critical aspects of the Internet.

The end-to-end principle requires that the network

not be changed to accommodate the uses of individ-

ual entities. Instead such uses are to be implemented

at the ends of the Internet. This is an important

principle for the development of resource sharing in

packet switching networks. This is not, however,

sufficient to make an Internet a reality. Neither is the

sharing of programming code, though this, too, is

desirable for Internet development and a desirable

networking goal. The critical aspect of the Internet’s

development is the ability to develop an architecture

that asks as little as possible of the collaborating

networks and that treats each network as a peer of the

other, rather than subordinating any network to any

other. This architecture, called by Kahn “open archi-

tecture,” is the critical principle of the Internet.

This architecture means that each network

wanting to interconnect and to communicate does not

have to ask any other network for permission to join.

This is one characteristic that leads Lessig and others

to call the Internet a “commons.” Also Internet

standards are freely available to all interested. There-

fore, any network can implement the TCP/IP protocol

suite as part of a host operating system and connect

with a gateway to other networks. This “open archi-

tecture” of the Internet facilitates its ability to spread

around the globe. Networks do not have to change

their nature or ownership to become part of the global

Page 18

Internet. The Internet welcomes the technical and

political diversity and provides for communication

accommodating this diversity.

Communication

among those with differences is a generative process.

It is in the interaction of diverse ideas that new ideas

emerge. (Michael Hauben, “The Net and the

Netizen,” in Hauben and Hauben, Netizens)

XII - Conclusion

The earliest development of the Internet and its

protocol suite TCP/IP solved the problem of sharing

resources across the boundaries of differing networks

and peoples. This development took place during the

1970s. It demonstrates the generative capacity of a

collaborative environment where the researchers

from different nations are able to work together to

create an ever evolving and developing Internet. This

is one of the most significant developments of the

20th century. Will it be studied and continued?

Lessig and others raise the possibility that it may all

be lost. A precious heritage has been contributed by

visionaries like Licklider and Engelbart, and research

pioneers like Kahn and Cerf, Davies and Kirstein,

Lundh and Spilling, and Pouzin and Zimmerman.

Many netizens have participated to create this impor-

tant advance for modern society.

Its loss would be

a great setback to our modern world. A collaborative

and resource sharing environment, similar to the one

that nourished the Internet’s earliest development,

continues to be needed, if we are to generate the

means for the Internet’s ongoing evolution.

Special thanks to Yngvar Lundh, Paal Spilling, Gisle

Hannemyr, Peter Kirstein, Les Earnest, Louis Pouzin, Dag

Belsnes, Andrew Hinchley, Robert Kahn, Dave Mills, Vint Cerf,

Horst Claussen, and Hans Vorst for providing background or

documents about this important period of Internet history. Ole

Jacobsen, Patrice Flichy and Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski also

provided helpful material or suggestions on people to contact, as

did several people on mailing lists. Please know the help is

appreciated. And thanks to Jay Hauben and in memoriam to

Michael Hauben for the work done that has set a foundation for

the understanding of Internet history. Also I want to thank Dr.

Samuel Moyn for his encouragement, helpful comments and

discussion toward the research for this paper.

Notes:

1. There are several books that document aspects of Internet

history, and others that document related developments that set

the foundation for the Internet. These include Janet Abbate,

Inventing the Internet, Cambridge, 1999; Katie Hafner and

Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, N.Y, 1996;

Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, Netizens: On the History

and Impact of Usenet and the Internet, Los Alamitos, 1997,

John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future, N.Y., 1999,

Arthur Norberg and Judy O’Neill, Transforming Computer

Technology, Baltimore, MD, 1996; Howard Reingold, Tools for

Thought, 1985 and reprinted 2000; Peter Salus, Casting the Net,

Reading, MA, 1995; Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas,

New York, 2001.

Vint Cerf observes that a lot has been left out of the current

histories, and “that a lot of mistakes are made - the popular

‘histories’ being the worst. Even when principals write, we

forget details or get them wrong.” And that one of his biggest

complaints is that many books focus mainly on the development

of the ARPANET. (Cerf, E-mail, April 13, 2003)

An example of such confusion, mistaking the development

of the ARPANET for the development of the Internet, is in The

Internet Galaxy, where Manuel Castells writes: “The origins of

the Internet are to be found in ARPANET.... The openness of

the ARPANET’s architecture allowed the future Internet to

survive its most daunting challenge.... ARPANET’s protocols

were based on the diversity of networks.” (pg 10, 26) (Oxford

University Press, 2001)

2. See Michael Hauben, “Social Forces Behind the Development

of Usenet” in Hauben and Hauben, Netizens. Draft version

online at http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook. Also see

Robert Kahn, “The Introduction of Packet Satellite Communica-

tion,” PROC NTC, November 1979.

To make communication possible among differ entities,

there is a need to have some common conventions or agree-

ments. In computer networking technology these are called

protocols. Describing the nature of communication in computer

networking, Cerf and Kirstein write: “A fundamental aspect of

interprocess communication is that no communication can take

place without some agreed upon conventions. The communicat-

ing processes must share some physical transmission medium

(wire, shared memory, radio spectrum, etc.) and they must use

common conventions or agreed upon translation methods in

order to successfully exchange and interpret the data they wish

to communicate. One of the key elements in any network

intercommunication strategy is therefore how the required

commonality is to be obtained. In some cases, it is enough to

translate one protocol into another. In others, protocols can be

held in common among the communicating parties.” (Vinton

Cerf and Peter Kirstein “Issues in Packet Network Interconnec-

tion”.)

Kahn describes the importance of recognizing the potential

for resource sharing in computer networking development:

“Computer networks provide a unique mechanism for increased

participation between individuals. Participation in research and

development using the distributed resources of a computer

network can lead to close cooperation between individuals who

might otherwise have little incentive to work together. This

interaction can further cross-fertilize the network community

and encourage even higher levels of achievement through

technical cooperation.” (Robert Kahn, “Resource Sharing

Computer Communications Networks”.)

3. “The ARPA computer communication network, ARPANET

... has been in operation since 1970. The main part of it operates

Page 19

within the U.S., but it has two tentacles, one to Hawaii and one

to Norway and England.” (Spilling, Research Proposal to

NATO, 1)

First Norway was connected to the ARPANET, and then

Great Britain. Later even several Eastern European countries

were involved with networking and knew of the ARPANET.

(See IIASA Networking Proceedings, Laxenburg, Austria, 1975)

4. Kirstein, commenting on the importance of the development

of TCP/IP as the means to make an Internet possible writes:

“Kahn is largely right, in that the ARPANET community in the

U.S. did not address these problems. The Europeans connected

to the ARPANET did. As early as 1974, mechanisms for

connecting British and French networks with the ARPANET

were being explored. By 1978, interconnection between the

British Research Network and the ARPANET had one link via

SATNET and one via International Packet Switched Service of

the British Telecom and Telenet. The technology used was not

that of the final Internet: the motivation was there. It was just

that the protocol wars had not been settled.”

He also comments, “This is the difference, the other

mechanisms explored internetworking: they did not embrace the

IP protocols.” (Kirstein, E-mail, October 3, 2002)

5. See Ronda Hauben, “Developing the New Field of Computer

Communications” http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/

other/computer-communications.txt and Ronda Hauben, “The

Birth of the Internet: An Architectural Conception for Solving

the Multiple Network Problem” http://www.columbia.edu/

~rh120/other/birth_internet.txt

Cyclades was the name for the network and the host

computers, while Cigale, for the French word for grasshopper,

was the packet switching subnetwork. In 2003, Louis Pouzin

was awarded the Legion of Honor award by the French govern-

ment for his networking contributions to the Internet’s develop-

ment.

Offering a description of the difficult environment that

made solving this problem even more challenging, Kirstein

writes: “By 1973, many PTTs were pursuing packet-switched

networks which led to the emergence of X.25 - which was,

incidentally embraced by Larry Roberts then at Telenet. This

was meant to be, and actually was, an Internet. All the protocol

structure could have been built on top of it. Indeed, in the British

Coloured Books, embraced by the British research network, this

was done. The technology was packet switched, but the inter-

connection was virtual circuit. This made it more difficult to

move to much higher speeds at the time. However many half

truths were prevalent in the ‘80s to state that X.25 could not

exceed 1 Mbps - at a time that the British research network was

operating at 8 Mbps.” (Kirstein, E-mail, October 4, 2002)

6. French researchers like Pouzin and others working on

Cyclades, and U.S. and other researchers involved with the

development of the Internet participated in a number of meet-

ings where they met and shared their research. For example, at

a relatively early stage in the development of the research to

create Cyclades, the director of the program, Louis Pouzin

remembers a visit by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf to his project on

March 19, 1973. Also during that year, Pouzin lists an

INFOTECH workshop and INWG meeting in London, Feb. 20-

23, 1973, and INWG meeting in NYC on June 7-8, 1973. He

lists a NATO summer school in Brighton at the Univ of Sussex

in England on Sept 10-14, 1973, and an ACM Data Communica-

tions Symposium in Tampa, Nov. 13-15, 1973. (Pouzin, E-mail,

April 28, 2003)

7. Robert Kahn also explains how there was the need to have

access to an experimental system in order to develop a Satellite

packet switching network. “This is the context in which an

experimental program on packet satellite technology was first

raised with the British Post Office, with... Comsat and subse-

quently with the Norwegian Telecommunications Administra-

tion and the NDRE.” Kahn, “The Introduction of Packet

Satellite Communications,” Sec 4.5.2.

Dave Mills describes the important negotiations with

INTELSAT that Kahn managed to achieve to be able to use

satellite for the SATNET program. Mills writes: “I reviewed the

common carrier documents for the satellite circuits. Bob actually

accomplished something nobody had done before. The war

games were played with the government telcos of six overseas

countries and two domestic U.S. carriers. None of these guys

could function relative to the others.... What seemed to make it

work was the participation of the military and military research

infrastructures of the U.S. (DoD), U.K. (RSRE) and Norway

(NDRE).”

“I don’t know where Germany (DFVLR) or the Italians got

their support. There was considerable friction between the

landline, earth station and satellite providers - they came from

very different cultural groups with rigid expectations for reve-

nue.”

“Case in point was the INTELSAT tariff for SATNET.

SATNET used a single 56-kbps SPADE satellite channel, but

eventually seven earth stations shared the channel. INTELSAT

wanted to charge full capacity for each earth station separately,

even though only uplink operated at a time. Bob managed to

negotiate more favorable terms, but then there were the earth

station operators, who wanted their fair share of the loot.”

“Example: INTELSAT charged the earth station operators

about U.S. $.05 per connected minute for the satellite channel

itself. You might remember the cost of a call between the U.S.

and U.K. was U.S. $2.40 at the time. Guess who got the

difference? For monthly cost to COMSAT for the INTELSAT

channel of U.S. $2160, COMSAT charged DoD some U.S.

$29,000. But, that included the SIMP depreciation used as the

satellite interface. Similar gouging occurred overseas.” (Mills,

E-mail, April 19, 2003)

8. The Tanum earth station built in 1970-71 made possible

international telecom traffic between Sweden and the rest of the

Nordic region.

When Dave Mills joined the research effort in 1976, he

explains that the NORSAR circuit was multiplexed with SDAC

seismic data and ARPANET traffic. The biggest problem he

writes, “was the unreliability of the Tanum-Kjeller microwave

link.” (Mills, E-mail, April 19, 2003)

It is also helpful to know something about the creation of

NORSAR to understand the collaborative relationship between

NDRE and IPTO.

Lundh explains that NORSAR is the Seismic Observatory

built in collaboration with ARPA in South Norway in the mid

Page 20

1960s. “The initiative and most of the financing,” he reports,

“was made by ARPA’s Nuclear Test Detection Office in an

effort to build a foundation for (an) international nuclear test ban

and to stop underground nuclear tests....” (Lund, E-mail, April

18, 2002)

This relationship was actually facilitated by a treaty

between the U.S. and Norwegian governments signed in 1968.

The agreement was toward the construction of a large seismic

array and research installation at Kjeller, Norway, just outside

of Oslo. After notes were exchanged between the American

Ambassador to Norway at the time, Margaret Jay Tibbets and

the Norwegian Minister for Foreign Affairs, John Lyng, an

agreement was reached which concerned: “seismological

research focused on development of methods and systems for

detection and identification of underground nuclear explosions.”

See http://www.norsar.no

The NORSAR (NORwegian Seismic ARay) website

describes the conditions of the treaty: “The agreement specified

that the purpose of the installation was to be seismological

research and experimentation primarily in the field of detection

seismology. At the same time the agreement provided that the

facility could be used for independent research at the direction

of the Norwegian government. A framework for funding the

construction and operation of the array facilities was also

specified.”

“Cooperating agencies were authorized on both sides to

conclude administrative agreements to carry out the details of

the agreement. The cooperating agency for the United States has

for more than 25 years been the Advanced Research Projects

Agency, while for Norway the cooperating agency during

construction of the NORSAR large-aperture array was the

Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, while the Royal

Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

(NTNF)was chosen in 1970 as cooperating agency for the

management of the facility....”

“NORSAR opened in 1969. Data gathered by it was

transmitted to a data center in Virginia, the Seismic Data

Analysis Center (SDAC). By 1970/71 the Nordic satellite station

in Tanum, Sweden was opened to transmit the data via satellite.

The transmission capacity of the satellite was 2.4 kb/s.”

Cerf adds that “The ARPA office in charge of Nuclear

Detection was called the Nuclear Monitoring Research Office.

Col David C. Russell worked in that office before he succeeded

Larry Roberts and J. C. R. Licklider as ARPA/IPTO director. On

Russell’s retirement from the U.S. Army, Bob Kahn, who was

then deputy director of the office, became office director of

IPTO.” (Cerf, E-mail, April 13, 2003)

9. With regard to funding the UCL research, eventually there

was also “funding from IPTO on ARPANET and then TCP/IP

experimentation. The funding mechanism involved the appropri-

ate foreign security reviews, but was otherwise like any other

funding.” (Kahn, E-mail, July 22, 2002)

10. It is generally believed that the transport of seismic data

from Norway to the U.S. was the reason for the Norwegian

connection to the ARPANET. Lundh explains that this is a

misunderstanding. It was interest in the research that IPTO was

doing, not the desire to transport seismic data more efficiently

between the U.S. and Norway, that was the motivating factor for

NDRE to accept the invitation from IPTO to join the Internet

research program.

11. Lundh reports that his first contact with ARPA was in Fall,

1965 when he “was invited to Washington and to Billings

Montana” on the occasion of the opening of the seismic array in

Montana LSSA (Large Scale Seismic Array). Lundh’s interest

was, he explains, in “powerful computing methods, notably

multicomputers.” His contacts at ARPA were Harry Sonneman

and Stephen Lukasik and occasionally Bob Frosh. (Lundh, E-

mail, April 18, 2002)

12. Kirstein’s paper was “On the Development of Computer and

Data Networks in Europe,” Proc. Int. Conf. on Computer

Communications, Washington, 240-244, 1972.

Cerf describes some of those present at the ICCC’72. He

lists Donald Davies from the U.K., National Physical Labora-

tory, Remi Despres who was involved with the French Reseau

Communication par Paquet (RCP), and later with X.25 network-

ing, Larry Roberts and Barry Wessler, from IPTO, Gesualdo

LeMoli, an Italian network researcher; Kjell Samuelson from the

Swedish Royal Institute, John Wedlake from British Telecom;

Peter Kirstein from University College London; Louis Pouzin

who led the Cyclades/Cigale packet network research program

at the Institute Recherche d’Informatique et d’Automatique

(IRIA, now INRIA, in France). Roger Scantlebury from NPL

with Donald Davies may also have been there and Alex

McKenzie from BBN probably was there. (Cerf, “How the

Internet Came to Be”)

Cerf writes that the IFWP later became the IFIP 6.1. with

the help of Alex Curran who was the U.S. representative to IFIP

Technical Committee 6. Cerf also credits Keith Uncapher and

Dick Tanaka with helping this affiliation to be carried out. (Cerf,

E-mail, April 13, 2003)

13. Spilling, however, writes, “Yngvar and I disagree a little on

this point. I had the impression that Bob Kahn was looking for

a good demonstration object, sort of on a global scale, to defend

all the spending on developing the technology. The seismic

detection facility NORSAR had to send seismic information

across a leased line to the processing plant in Washington, D.C.

And what could be a better demonstration object, than to convey

this information via packet switching technology from Norway

to the U.S. From what I understood, Bob Kahn used this as an

example of the usability of the technology – when NORSAR

became connected – toward his defence funding party.”

Lundh responds that: “I believe Paal may well be right in

his impression of Bob’s motive for inviting Norway. However,

my reason for suggesting that NDRE accept the invitation to

actively collaborate and to actually undertake that collaboration

was my interest in resource sharing networking and its manifold

possibilities. That interest was first inspired by Bob Kahn and

Larry Roberts and the Washington, DC conference and demo in

1972. It was further strengthened later by all that we learned and

experienced during the following years of collaboration.”

(Lundh, E-mail, October 15, 2002)

Cerf adds that “The original circuit was 2400 baud so the

9600 baud, circuit, though shared, was faster for the data

transport. Later SATNET provided 64 kb/s service.” (Cerf, E-

mail, April 13, 2003)

Page 21

Kirstein writes that “It (Seismic array technology or test

detection-ed) was ARPA’s original reason for placing a TIP

there. From the time ARPANET came on-stream in 1970,

ARPA wanted to bring the NORSAR array to SDAC in Wash-

ington over ARPANET. This is what justified the bulk of the

ARPA expenditure (from the Nuclear Monitoring Research

Office - NMROP on the link in the early days.) I do not know

when the extension...which did result from the extended IPTO

interest in the NMRO activity, put actual expenditure in the

IPTO budget.” (Kirstein, E-mail, October 8, 2002)

14. Important developments in satellite technology in the 1960s

and early 1970s led to the development of INTELSAT IV and

made possible the SATNET packet switching network.

Abramson and Kuo write: “In 1970 the ARPA Network came

into existence as a communications network for the sharing of

resources among a large number of computer centers. The

ARPANET and its resource sharing capabilities became feasible

because of the use of a new method of communication system

organization – called packet switching.... In April 1965, the

scope and nature of human communication was irreversibly

altered by the successful launch of INTELSAT I, the first

geosynchronous communication satellite. Since that time the

cost of information transmission over long distances has

decreased at a rate that makes even the present decrease in

information processing costs seem mild by comparison. The cost

per year of a single voice grade channel in INTELSAT I was

about $20,000 per year; that satellite had a capacity of 24 such

channels. The corresponding cost on INTELSAT IV, launched

in January 1971 was about $2,000 per year, and each

INTELSAT IV has about 5,000 channels....”

“By the beginning of 1973 the lower cost, higher channel

capacity, higher power, and small ground stations required by

new communication satellites had suggested the magnitude of

the impact these developments would make in computer-

communication networks of the future.... By the end of 1972, the

worldwide satellite communication net of INTELSAT had been

completed....” (from Preface, Norman Abramson and Franklin

F. Kuo) Computer-Communications Networks edited by

Abramson and Kuo, 1973, Englewood Cliffs, N.Y., xvii.)

15. For further elaboration see Ronda Hauben, “The Birth of the

Inter net ” http ://www. columb ia. ed u/~r h120/o the r/

birth_internet.txt and Ronda Hauben, “Open Architecture,” in

The Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History. Raul

Rojas, Editor, Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago, 2001, vol 2, pp. 652-

653.

Kirstein adds: “This was Kahn’s thinking, but there was

also a practical consideration. The basis of all the network itself

between 1969 and 1974 was the IMP, and this was firmly under

the control of one division of BBN. With the interest in the

Packet Radio and SATNET, any attempt to connect them was

delayed by the need to further develop the IMP to meet all its

demands. This was one very important reason why Kahn

proposed a ‘gateway’ which could be programmed by others,

freeing the programs from the stranglehold of one group. In

practice the IMPs could now be developed differently for the

different network technologies. Moreover, an important devel-

opment occurred. Shortly after, in 1975/76 when Dave Mills

(then at COMSAT) programmed the ‘fuzzballs’, to provide a

cheaper and more lightweight alternative to the BBN implemen-

tation.” (Kirstein, E-mail, July 3, 2002)

Cerf elaborates, “In this case, the fuzzballs were function-

ing as routers - handled IP switching as opposed to the IMPs.

The apples-to-apples comparison would be between fuzzballs

and the BBN Internet Gateways. I believe in fact the fuzzballs

were providing all the functionality of the IMPs and the gate-

ways by switching IP packets.” (Cerf, E-mail, April 13, 2003)

Kirstein adds that the development of the application level

relay “during this period was also a new form of interconnec-

tion” which “allowed all the British network developments to

occur independently of the U.S. ones, but traffic still to flow

easily between the networks.”

He explains that, “This was not an interconnection at the

network level, but at the application protocol level (Telnet, FTP

initially). This form of interconnection was new at the time,

(and-ed) allowed the different networks to develop quite

independently. In fact it was to exercise this new concept, that

all the traffic between the U.K. and ARPANET was justified in

the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Later in the ‘80s, this concept even

allowed the U.S. to develop Mockapetris’ Domain Name

System, while the U.K. developed the ‘Network Registration

Service’.”

“While these developments were quite different,” Kirstein

notes that, “the relay function allowed them to look to users as

a single network.... Clearly application level relays are not

adequate in performance or robustness, however, they played an

important role prior to the world agreeing that IP was the way to

go.” (See the article by V.G. Cerf and P.T. Kirstein, “Issues in

Packet Network Interconnection,” Proc IEEE 66, 11, pp 1386-

1408, November 1978. This is a special issue devoted to packet

internetworking issues.)

Kirstein adds: “In fact the original grant I had from ARPA

was to connect in two computers, the large IBM Computer at the

Rutherford Laboratory near Oxford and the CDC in London.

Both were the centre of centralised proprietary interactive and

remote job entry networks. This connection was made as one

between two networks from the beginning. It looked to

ARPANET as if IBM was directly connected as a Host, and any

ARPANET Host looked like a remote IBM device.” (Higginson,

PL, PT Kirstein and AV Stokes: “The Problems Connecting

Hosts into ARPANET via Front-end Computers,” Workshop on

Distributed Computer Systems, Darmstadt (1974). Lloyd, D and

PT Kirstein: “Alternative Approaches to the Interconnection of

Computer Networks,” London, Proc European Comp. Conf. on

Communications Networks, London, Online, 499-515 (1975))

Kirstein continues: “This was not an Internet design; this

was connections at an application level, and hence not very

rugged. However, this mechanism continued for the next 15

years, while the British NREN became quite sophisticated,

including packet switching, their version of the Domain Name

Service (Name Registration Scheme), FTP, Telnet, mail, etc. By

1990, while the links to the Internet had long gone IP, the hosts

on the British networks were running a totally different set of

protocols. While history (and the analysis we made at the time)

showed this was not the best, rugged or fast way to go, it

allowed both interconnectivity and independent development of

protocol structures to co-exist until all the bugs had been

resolved in the Internet protocols, and also commercial products

to be produced by new firms such as Cisco.” (Kirstein, E-mail,

Page 22

Oct 3, 2002)

16. The Brighton INWG meeting took place just after the NATO

Advanced Institute. Though the original protocol was called

TCP, it later was split into two parts and from then on called

TCP/IP. When the paper describing the philosophy and design

for TCP was officially published in May, 1974, the authors, Vint

Cerf and Bob Kahn, wrote: “The authors wish to thank a number

of colleagues for helpful comments during early discussions of

international network protocols especially R. Metcalfe, R.

Scantlebury, D. Walden, H. Zimmerman. D. Davies and L.

Pouzin who constructively commented on the fragmentation and

accounting issues, and S. Crocker who commented on the

creative destruction of associations.”(p 643) (See also, Ronda

Hauben, “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,”

in The Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History. Raul

Rojas, Editor, Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago, 2001, vol 2, pp. 652-

653.)

16a. Describing the process of creating a protocol specification,

or Request for Comment (RFC), Mills writes, “One of the

principal drivers in the standardization effort was the published

TCP and IP standards, which were issues both as RFCs and

Military Specifications (MILSPEC). Bob considered this a

major coup. Later, DoD policy saluted COTS (Commercial Off

the Shelf) and told the agencies to avoid MILSPEC. Nobody at

the time happened to notice that TCP and IP were MILSPECs.

There is a lot more to the formal specification issues. The

RFCs were designed principally as instructions to system

programmers on how to implement the protocol and as such

should not be considered formal standard specifications. Later

at great expense and contractor involvement (SDC) a formal

specification was in fact prepared. I was consultant on that

project, which did in fact do the right thing. So far as I know, the

document is rusting in a dark place.” (Mills, E-mail, April 28,

2003)

17. Remembering the meeting in Brighton, U.K. in September

1973, Lundh writes that he first met Dag Belsnes at it. Lundh

writes that “it was clear to me then that Dag knew much more

than I did about protocol details.”

Describing his introduction to networking research,

Belsnes writes that he had “started working with data communi-

cation in 1970 at the University of Oslo. The university was

(connected) by a CDC Cyber computer together with some other

research institutions (among them, the Norwegian Defense

Research Establishment, where Yngvar was working) and the

computer was to be located about 25 km away from the univer-

sity campus. I headed a team,” he writes, “that implemented a

network system to connect this remote (system-ed) at the

university (a CDC 3300, Nord computer (a mini-computer of the

Norwegian company Norsk Data) and later a DEC 10.) The

design of the local university network was highly influenced by

what we could read about ARPA and Cyclades networks.”

(Belsnes, E-mail, June 17, 2002) Explaining Belsnes’ contribu-

tion, Cerf writes: “Actually Dag worked out the need for a 5-

way handshake to assure that old duplicate packets would not be

confused for new ones. We concluded this was too much

overhead and chose a three way handshake with a timeout

mechanism to ‘clear the net’ of old packets from a given

connection. I considered Dag’s work to provide a very solid

ground for the TCP - as did Ray Tomlinson, Yogen Dalal who

worked on the 3-way version and Carl Sunshine who did

correctness proofs for this version.” (Cerf, E-mail, April 13,

2003)

Also Kuninobu Tanno (from Tohoku University) from

Japan was part of the Stanford seminars Cerf held to explore

“how to get host computers to communicate across multiple

packet networks without knowing the network technology

underneath.” (Cerf, “How the Internet Came to Be”)

18. See the diagram from the “Uses of the ARPA Network via

the University College London Node” by Peter T Kirstein and

Sylvia B. Kenny, IIASA Conference on Networks, Laxenburg,

Austria, 1975, p. 54. Lundh calls Kjeller “the little townlet

where some research establishments reside, some 20 km NE of

OSLO.”

Cerf explains that the TIPs were just part of the

ARPANET, “we did not yet have gateways/routers running IP.”

(Cerf, E-mail, April 13, 2003)

19. Lundh also writes: “Later, I believe, around 1981-82 when

I could no longer get even the small support needed at NDRE,

Paal left NDRE (with my blessings) and took the equipment

with him to the neighboring institute (‘TF’), the research

establishment of the Norwegian Telecom Administration. They

are located at Kjeller also, just across the street from NDRE and

next to NORSAR. Paal was alone there being interested in

Internetworking. NTA did not believe in the Internet until about

1995 – similarly to most telecom operators.... I think only one

person at TF gave Paal some help during those years. Going

back some years again, a few months after Paal joined me he

also got another friend of his (Aage Stensby) over from his old

group at NDRE, having become ‘similarly superfluous’ there.

However, Paal was the main contributor without any doubt.

Later on I was able to recruit a few more people to the network-

ing effort.... The most active ones were Oyvind Hvinden and

Finn Arve Aagesen. Both (were) very good people.... Finn Arve

is an unusually able person and made a great contribution during

the short time he was with us....” (Lundh, E-mail, June 12, 2002)

20. Kirstein disagrees about the prohibition of commercial sites,

though not of commercial traffic. He writes that the UCL

connection was to the public telecom and consequently was

accessible to both commercial and academic sites. There was

broad usage of the network in the U.K. and hence there was

much interest in it. As Kirstein explains, “A management

committee, which included the British Post Office, had to

approve all sites connected and their use. From the late '70s,

applications included quasi-commercial usage where one site

was a British contractor to a U.S. Agency, and the other the U.S.

Agency or another such U.S. contractor – usually in relation to

R & D projects. When requested by the U.S. such usage was

normally approved; we were only concerned that the experimen-

tal nature of the interconnection would not lead to any legal

responsibilities to the user entities. In the U.K. we connected the

TIP to the Public Telephone network immediately (by Septem-

ber 1973, and to the British research networks (from late

1973)).” (Kirstein, E-mail, October 8, 2002.) “I should add,” he

writes, that “the British Post Office was part of the management

Page 23

committee which was told all that we were doing. For this

reason they tolerated activities they might otherwise have

forbidden; they were clearly contrary to their monopoly.”

(Kirstein, E-mail, Oct. 3, 2002)

21. Spilling continues: “The control program therefore must be

an integral part of the programs in the Host computers wishing

to participate in internetwork connections. The device intercon-

necting the two networks is called a Gateway.... The Gateway is

connected to the two networks. Net 1 and Net 2, in the same

way as normal Host computers, and therefore looks like a Host

to both networks. When Host 1 wishes to exchange data with

Host 2, it forms an internet packet according to the TCP format

and encloses it in the format required by Net 1, for communica-

tions in that network. This action...is called ‘wrapping.’ The

internet packet is then transported to the Gateway where it is

unwrapped from the Net 1 format and is re-wrapped in the

format for Net 2 for transmission across the net to Host 2. This

process can easily be extended through an arbitrary number of

networks and gateways. This form of data exchange between

Host 1 and Host 2 looks to all intermediate networks like normal

host-host communications, thus the local networks are not aware

of any internetwork activities. This is taken care of by the TCP’s

in Host 1 and Host 2 and by the Gateway.” (Spilling, Proposal

to NATO, pg 5)

Cerf explains the process using the term “encapsulation”:

“We adopted very early the idea of encapsulating IP packets in

the packets of connected networks - the gateways would remove

the IP packets from the carrying packet format and re-encapsu-

lated it in the next networks packet structure. Of course, before

we split IP from TCP, it was just TCP packets that were encapsu-

lated.” (Cerf, E-mail, April 13, 2003)

22. See Spilling, “Final Report,” for a description of how the

SATNET program was initially developed using the ARPANET

and gradually separated apart from the ARPANET. The SIMPs

were the Satellite IMPs created for interfaces for SATNET. He

writes: “The purpose of the Packet Satellite Program is to

develop a general-purpose satellite network based upon the

packet-switching principles... In order to utilize as much as

possible the facilities available in ARPANET, the initial satellite

network was an integral part of ARPANET.... During the

program period, the SIMPs were developed to a stage where

they could be separated from the ARPANET, so that the SIMP

programs could be optimised for the satellite environment.... As

mentioned, the SIMPs initially were logically a part of

ARPANET and therefore had to obey the ARPANET IMP-IMP

protocol. This was done in order to utilize the ARPANET

techniques in maintaining and controlling the satellite part of the

network from the Network Control Center (NCC) at BBN.

Gradually the SIMP programs were evolved to such a level that

SATNET could be separated from ARPANET, and its operation

fine tuned to the satellite environment. The separation made it

necessary to develop an interface both for host access to

SATNET and for access to and from other nets....”

23. See list of the PSPWG notes in Spilling, “Final Report”.

24. Kirstein writes, “Certainly by 1979, the SATNET project as

a development project had been largely completed. There was

a major meeting in Washington, with a session on SATNET. I

know that UCL participated in it.... At that meeting we used

packet voice to present part of the proceedings from London in

Washington. I am sure that CNUCE (Pisa, Italy) and DFVLR

(Munich, Germany) were well and truly aboard by them.

Equally clearly the SATNET route had become an operational

entity by around 1983, using TCP/IP. Shortly after that the

academic parties in Italy and Germany dropped out. The

Defence parts never played any important role in network

development in Germany, Italy or the U.K.” See also Kirstein,

PT, et al. “SATNET Applications Activities,” Proc. Nat.

Telecom. Conf. Washington, 45.1.1-45.1.7(1979). (Kirstein, E-

mail, October 3, 2002)

Cerf adds that “In fact, we formed a coordination board -

the International Coordination Board (ICB) that included

NDRE, UCL, the German DFVLR and the Italian CNUCE as

well as DARPA to coordinate the international efforts.” (Cerf,

E-mail, April 13, 2003)

25. In “The Internet- A Cuckoo in the Telecom Service Nest An

Evolution in Packet Switching” Spilling gives as an example of

such a decision process – the command and control processes of

the Department of Defense.

26. See Michael Hauben, “The Vision of Interactive Computing

and the Future” and Ronda Hauben, “The Birth and Develop-

ment of the ARPANET” in Netizens and Ronda Hauben,

“Licklider” in Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer

History. Often, in funding proposals, it seems that only com-

puter resource sharing is referred to rather than human commu-

nication facilitated by computers. See for example Ronda

Hauben, Chapter 1, in Cyberhypes(in German).

27. ARPANET News, February 1974, Editorial, pp. 2-3.

28. These statements of a vision for a communications system

identified a goal for the development process and thus made it

possible to evaluate whether the actual development makes

progress toward this goal or not.

29. Several articles provide an overview to document this

international collaborative research process. Such a process, was

essential to develop both a prototype and then the Internet. See

for example: Kahn, Robert E., “The Introduction of Packet

Satellite Communications,” in Proc NTC, November, 1979, pp.

45.1.1-45.1.6.

Lundh, Yngvar, “Yngvar Lundh: Computers and Commu-

nication – Early development of Computing and Internet

Technology - a Groundbreaking part of Technical History.” in

Telektronikk Vol 97 No 2/3 2001, pp. 3-19.

Paal Spilling, “Research Proposal presented to NATO,

Scientific Affairs Division by Norwegian Defence Research

Establishment also on behalf of University College London and

Stanford University, California concerning A Study of the

Transmission Control Program, a Novel Program for Internet-

work Computer Communications.” 2 December 1975, NDRE.

30. Also the packet radio network (PRNET) program made

important contributions to the creation of the Internet. See Kahn,

Robert E., “The Organization of Computer Resources into a

Page 24

Packet Radio Network,” IEEE Transactions on Communica-

tions, Vol Com-25, No. 1, January 1977, pp. 169-178.

31. Lessig writes, “The environment of the Internet is now

changing. Features of the architecture – both legal and technical

that created this environment of free creativity are now being

changed. They are being changed in ways that will reintroduce

the very barriers that the Internet originally removed.” (Lessig,

p. 16)

32. Considering the international collaborative process needed

to develop “open architecture” as the foundation for the Internet,

it is interesting that Lessig describes architecture as referring “to

both the Internet’s technical protocols (e.g. TCP/IP) and its

entrenched structures of governance and social patterns of usage

that themselves are not easily changeable, at least not without

coordinated action by many parties.” (from Lawrence Lessig

and Paul Resnick, “Zoning Internet Speech,” Michigan Law

Review, 98 (1999):395, quoted as footnote 34 in Lawrence

Lessig, The Future of Ideas, Random House, NY, 2001, p 276.)

33. See Kirstein and Cerf’s explanation of the conventions

needed to make communication possible in their November

1978 article.

34. Describing the work of Licklider and Taylor in their article

“The Computer as a Communication Device,” Michael Hauben

writes: “Their concept of the sharing of both computing and

human resources together matches the modern Net. The net-

working of various human connections quickly forms, changes

its goals, disbands and reforms into new collaborations. The

fluidity of such group dynamics leads to a quickening of the

creation of new ideas. Groups can form to discuss an idea, focus

in or broaden out and reform to fit the new ideas that have been

worked out.” from “The Net and Netizens: The Impact the Net

has on People’s Lives,” Chapter 1 in Netizens.

35. Michael Hauben, “Preface,” Netizens.

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mail April 26, 2002

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Appendix

Additional Comments from the Researchers

An issue of the Computer Communications Review (vol 20,

no 5, Oct 1990) provides a set of ARPANET maps documenting

different phases in the development of the ARPANET. The

maps are also helpful in providing a chronology of the transition

from the ARPANET to the Internet.

Following are some of the relevant dates:

Jun. '75 - Satellite circuits now cross oceans to Hawaii and

the U.K. First TCP implementations tested in this configuration

by Stanford, Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), and University

College London (UCL).

April '79 - Multiple satellite links to U.K. and Norway.

According to Kirstein, one U.K.-U.S. link made via the commer-

cial British Post Office International Packet Switched Ser-

vice(IPSS) using IP/X.25, the other using the SATNET. Some

U.K. traffic starts using the IPSS route.

Mar '82 - Norway leaves the ARPANET and become an

Internet connection via TCP/IP over SATNET.

Nov '82 - UCL leaves the ARPANET and becomes an

Internet connection.

Cerf writes that in 1979 satellite systems were extended to

include the ground stations in Italy and Germany. (Cerf, “How

the Internet Came to Be”) Horst Claussen confirms this:

Describing the participation of Germany in SATNET,

Claussen writes: “Having no access to some of the documents

I saved back in Salzburg: the first access to the ARPAnet was

established in the 1977-1978 time frame when I was involved in

the DARPA HOL program which later on led to the program-

Page 26

ming language Ada. We connected through a Public Data

Network to the VAN gateway at BBN and were ‘on the net’.

Later on the idea came up to cooperate with the German Space

Research Center (then DFVLR - now called DLR) in

Oberpfaffenhofen who was involved in satellite communications

and had a cooperation with Comsat Labs. Comsat Labs also was

involved in the SATNET and this way we got back to DARPA -

Bob Kahn was very supportive and so was Vint Cerf. Then I

joined DFVLR in 1981 and we found support in the German

Ministry of Defense and we also could get funding for a PSP (I

recall that the thing cost U.S. $275K - and that at a time when

the exchange rate for the German Mark fell through the bottom!)

The most difficult thing was to get the support of the German

PTT - Research Center people who ‘owned’ and operated the

old Symphonie Station at Raisting; Symphonie was an early

satellite project funded by the EEC which had been terminated

and there was this beautiful antenna and ground station building

sitting empty at Raisting. Mostly through the unofficial support

by the local engineers we were able to set up the PSP and the

gateway at Raisting and connect to the research center at

Oberpfaffenhofen which is some 20 miles away. Don’t ask me

how much we had to pay for the 9.6kbit/sec leased line from

Oberpfaffenhofen to Raisting - horribly expensive.

When it comes to the exact dates I will have to dig up

some of my old files but officially it must have been at least

1982, maybe even 1983 until we got the official permission,

however, we did operate the SATNET station almost a year

under a ‘temporary testing agreement’.

In May 1985 we ran a combined Packet Radio - SATNET

demonstration for the German Armed Forces and for the U.S.

Army at Heidelberg simultaneously and this was quite success-

ful. SATNET was in operation after I left DFVLR for another

year or two and used mainly for measurements and tests besides

being used for Internet protocol development. (I forgot to

mention that we did implement IP, TCP, UDP etc. in Modula-2

for our own VAX system and that this implementation was later

ported to the Siemens computers used by FGAN (another

government lab working for MOD) for the Packet Radio -

SATNET demonstrations.” (Horst Claussen, E-mail, April 17,

2003)

Hans Dodel offers a similar account: “The German

participation in SATNET began in the seventies, when the

German military became interested enough to ask their ‘Consul-

tant Agency’ IABG to watch what was going on there. Within

IABG it was Dr. Horst Claussen who would come to the

SATNET meetings then, which I joined in 1979 or 1980.”

“Horst and I both joined the German Air and Space

Administration DFVLR and spent many years there, working on

SATNET and establishing the first Gateway to SATNET in

continental Europe. (I think the Royal Signals and Radar

Establishment in Malvern, U.K., beat us by a few months.)”

(Hans Dodel, E-mail, April 17, 2003)

These accounts help to document that there were both

ARPANET and Internet connections between UCL, Norway,

Germany and the U.S. The Packet Satellite Program (PSP)

provides a means of understanding the transition from the

ARPANET to the Internet with the development of TCP/IP.

First the ARPANET was used to develop TCP/IP. Then

SATNET was created as a packet satellite network, and the

research on TCP/IP was transitioned from the ARPANET to

SATNET providing communication between diverse networks

via TCP/IP. Hence this was an important step to creating the

Internet. A series of Packet Satellite Program Working Papers

(PSPWP) were issued to document “Ideas, specific investiga-

tions, and results and software and hardware specifications.”

(Spilling, Lundh, and Aagesen) Like the Packet Switching

Protocol group that Lundh describes, the Packet Satellite

Program (PSP) held regularly scheduled meetings, rotating

through the institutions where the researchers worked. This was

to encourage the exchange of ideas and the coordination of their

activities. Norwegian researchers explain the nature of the

program. They write (Spilling, Lundh, and Aagesen): “In mid

1975 the Packet Satellite Program (PSP) was initiated by

DARPA, with the purpose to develop a satellite-based, packet-

switching communication network, to demonstrate its capabili-

ties, and to investigate its performance factors.”

The program involved the collaboration of a number of

research groups in the U.S. and Europe. In the appendix to the

Report they list the groups.

SATNET was used as an experimental testbed for their

research. To begin with, SATNET was an integral part of the

ARPANET, but as the research evolved, SATNET became a

free standing separate network. The devices connecting

SATNET with the ARPANET were called Gateways.

Describing the importance of gateways and Kahn’s

foresight regarding the development of the Internet, Kirstein

writes (Kirstein, E-mail, July 3, 2002): “Bob Kahn’s real

contribution here was to recognize in 1974 the conceptual need

of these gateways and to design them at a level which would

endure.”

Kirstein also describes other important innovations that

were crucial at the time, but didn’t endure. Yet these innovations

played an important role in helping the Internet survive a

number of obstacles it faced. Kirstein writes, (Ibid): “One of the

really important developments of the mid '70s was the ability to

create relays and gateways between networks to allow different

technologies to be interconnected – without a complete capitula-

tion by each group to adopt the U.S. and Internet Suite. Some

like DECNET and BITNET capitulated in the late '80s; others

like the British networks, stayed different until the early '90s.

However, it was because they were interconnected, and IP was

then demonstrated to be better that it really won the war.... My

own approach was pragmatic; it worked well at the level, and for

the purpose, that I intended; however, it could not be extended

to meet the needs of the future generation. To give...an example

of the importance of the connection capability, I was ordered by

1977 (by people in our research council) to stop work on IP

networks, because they were contrary to the British activities. It

was only because of support from other bodies in the U.K. and

U.S., and because I could continue to work with the IP networks

connected to the favoured British flavours, that the large-scale

experimental services could continue over the next 10-12 years.”

Elaborating on how ARPANET and SATNET were

different entities, Spilling writes: “ARPANET and SATNET

operated in parallel for a long period. UCL in London and

NDRE at Kjeller had both access to ARPANET via a TIP at

UCL and a TIP at Kjeller.... There was a leased line from

London to Kjeller and a fully or partly defence-related line from

Kjeller to Wiesbaden in Germany and then over satellite to the

ARPANET in the U.S. This was the situation as far as I can

Page 27

remember until say mid 1982. The SATNET experiment ran

from 1976 till 1979. Then it turned ‘operational.’ That meant, no

real experiments. Further it meant that European sites, mainly

NDRE and UCL could start interconnecting their local networks

to SATNET via Gateways at Kjeller and UCL, and communi-

cate with U.S. hosts through a Gateway in the U.S. This

replaced gradually the services provided by the TIPs or via the

TIPs. This was then to be known as the INTERNET, with

capital letters, and as such was a fact at the end of 1979.”

Spilling notes that: “ARPANET links from the U.S. over

satellite to Kjeller and a narrow-bank link further on to UCL,

were not efficient and required special treatment by BBN. It was

therefore a push to move away from ARPANET and over on

SATNET. NDRE had its first INTERNET host up 1981/82,

making use of Dave Mills’ ‘fuzzball’ software.”

But Spilling does not have a direct reference to when the

ARPANET link to Kjeller/London was decommissioned. Kahn

confirms these accounts. Kirstein remembers that it was in 1981

that UCL used SATNET. He writes, “UCL was the first to

introduce the Internet protocols as their sole way of

communicating with the ARPANET in 1981. This was not to be

pioneering. We changed computers and the new ones did not

support NCP.” (Kirstein, E-mail, October 3, 2002.)

Spilling writes (Kahn, E-mail, Sept. 5, 2002): “(I)n the

1970s, I initiated a broadcast packet satellite (SATNET)

experiment on INTELSAT IV with the first participants being

the U.S. and U.K. The third participant (of what eventually were

five participants) was Norway. We were already conducting

internet experiments over SATNET in the late 1970s using

TCP/IP.

In the early 1980s, we decided to rely solely on SATNET

for connectivity with Europe and thus the two 9.6 kbps lines,

which were running in parallel with the SATNET connections,

were decommissioned.”

As Kirstein and Kahn emphasize, there were five nations

who were participants in the SATNET experiment. He writes

that SATNET included not only the U.S., Norway and Great

Britain, but eventually also sites at DFVLR in

Oberpfaffinghofen, Germany (near Munich), and CNUCE in

Pisa, attached to the Fucino earth station in Italy. (Kirstein, E-

mail, July 3, 2002)

Providing a general chronology of the development of the

3 different packet networks that TCP/IP interconnected to

become the Internet, Spilling writes, “DARPA...had three

different networking technologies under development in the

'70s, namely:

o The ARPANET; 1969 ->

o The Packet Radio Network (PRNET); 1973 ->

o A packet satellite network, called SATNET; 1976-1979”

“This implies,” Spilling writes, “that the need for a

protocol that would connect these diverse networks was

recognized early on and that resulted in the paper by Cerf and

Kahn, ‘A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.’”

Explaining the difficulty of involving different countries in

the research process, Spilling writes: “The start of the develop-

ment and experimentation with SATNET was considerably

delayed. The idea was to use one 64 kb/s channel in the so

called ‘Multi-destination half duplex’ mode, with ground

stations in Norway, England, Germany, Italy and the USA. The

endpoints of this channel were terminated in equipment owned

by different organizations. This was unheard of in the

Intelsat/Comsat organisations, and they had no policy for

handling this case – no regulations and no tariff ratings.

If I remember correctly, Bob Kahn spent a long time

hammering on the satellite organizations – more than a year – to

have them accept this new mode of operation.”

Spilling explains the result of the creation of SATNET was

the creation of the INTERNET. He writes: “When SATNET

development was ending in 1979 and the TCP/IP protocols were

matured sufficiently, SATNET was used as a means to intercon-

nect local area networks in Norway, England, Germany, and

Italy with ARPANET, which interconnected many LANs

scattered all over the U.S. continent. This constellation formed

the INTERNET with capital letters, interconnecting defence

institutions and research institutions with military contracts,

hence forming a very closed community. As you have men-

tioned, you needed permission from DARPA in order to connect

with this community.”

According to Kahn, by the 1980s there was a connection

between these different country networks using a gateway to

SATNET and then a gateway to connect to the ARPANET,

“This was not a link over ARPANET,” he emphasizes(Kahn, E-

mail, Sept 11, 2002), “It was a connection using SATNET,

which was a broadcast satellite system.... This is if you like an

ETHERNET IN THE SKY with drops in Norway (actually

routed via Sweden) and then the U.K. and later Germany and

Italy. (Graphic IV)

Kahn explains that NDRE and UCL had been experiment-

ing with TCP/IP before the cutover to TCP/IP took place on the

ARPANET in January 1983. Therefore until January 1983,

NDRE and UCL had two paths they would use. They could still

use NCP over the ARPANET links until they were disman-

tled...and in parallel TCP/IP could be used over SATNET. Once

the ARPANET links were dismantled, they had only the

SATNET remaining.” (See also From the ARPANET to the

Internet: A Study of the ARPANET TCP/IP Digest.)

http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/ tcpdraft.txt

When the ARPANET nodes serving the U.K. and Norway

were decommissioned, researchers in these countries had to use

TCP/IP over SATNET. Responding to a question as to whether

the 1983 cutover to TCP/IP on the ARPANET created a new

form of connection on the ARPANET, Kahn replies, “No. It was

not a new form of connection so much as it was using a different

protocol over the ARPANET (i.e. TCP/IP vs NCP) and thus, in

effect, everyone on the ARPANET was now Internet enabled

since they could talk with anyone else with TCP/IP on the

Internet.”

GRAPHICS

Graphic I – Diagram of NPL, CYCLADES and ARPANET as

prototype for Internet

http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/1.pdf

Graphic II – Diagram of UCL, NORSAR and ARPANET links

from Kirstein’s 1975 paper

http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/2.pdf

Graphic III – Diagram of plan for 1981 IIASA computer

Page 28

networking linking research centers in Eastern and Western

Europe and U.S. http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/3.pdf

Graphic IV – SATNET as an Ethernet in the Sky

http://www.ais.org /~ronda/new.papers/4.pdf

Graphic V – 1977 Internet Experiment

http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/5.pdf

[Editor’s Note: This article was written in May 1996

to document the importance of Netizen ship in Japan.

The story it tells is still important as Izumi Aizu’s

other article in this issue demonstrates.]

Emergence of Netizens in

Japan and Its Cultural Impli-

cations for the Net Society

Izumi Aizu

[email protected]

In Japan, just as in many other countries of the

world, the Internet (the Net) has become a popular

subject for the business and general press. Despite

this interest, few TV programs seriously picked up on

the ‘culture’ of the Net, or of its Netizens. In Febru-

ary 1996, one network designed a program to discuss

the future of the Net, by the Netizens, and for the

Netizens. The combined use of TV and the Internet

highlighted some of the differences in the roles and

features of these two very different media. The

exchange also suggested new possibilities for mixing

the two. Most important, the program presented a

dynamic picture of social change in Japan.

Netizens and Live TV

On February 17, 1996, a Friday evening turning

into Saturday morning, past midnight, close to 1:15

A.M., TV Tokyo began the live TV discussion

program “What’s Going to Happen to the Internet in

Japan?” For the next two and one-half hours a panel

of 15 experts representing the spectrum of knowledge

in Japan about the Internet participated in a spirited

discussion. A few meters from the main table were

nearly 40 spectators, or Netizens, all avid Internet

users. They stood the entire time like a crowd in a

British football stadium.

One week before the broadcast, an Internet

E-mail list was created and nearly 800 participants

were polled on their views of how the discussion

should be formatted, what issues should be presented,

who should be on the panel, and what style of discus-

sion would be most suitable to the TV medium. Few

respondents, if any, were specialists in TV produc-

tion. There are examples where the Internet was used

during a TV program to get some input via E-mail or

CU-SeeMe to the studio, but this was different.

Opening the planning process of a TV program for

the public’s input via [an Internet] mailing list before

it was aired is, as far as I know, the first attempt in

the TV production business in Japan.

The live TV program was designed to be interac-

tive, yet it was extremely difficult to handle much of

the input from the Internet on a real-time basis. A few

comments were selected and read from E-mails sent

in during the program, but it was not easy to incorpo-

rate effectively such external inputs into an ongoing

broadcast framework. Rather, the preceding discus-

sion on the [Internet] mail list felt much more con-

structive in terms of its actual contribution to the

program. It gave a greater sense of ‘sharing’ the

process among the mailing list participants. The

real-time interaction had significant constraints.

The network planning team released the original

production plan to the mailing list. The producers

planned to pick-up such themes as “Cyberporn in the

Net” including the passage of the CDA (Communica-

tion Decency Act) in United States and the citizen

protests against it. At the time, it was the hottest topic

on the Net around the world. Although some people

didn’t like the idea of beginning the show with such

a “filthy” story, others found it an important cultural

and ethical issue. The production people also said

they want to pick up Bob Metcalfe’s “Internet Catas-

trophe” article in InfoWorld that pointed out ten

reasons why the Internet may collapse during 1996.

Among them being: slow and expensive telephone

lines, greedy commercial business invasion, and strict

content regulations. Several strong opinions against

using this pessimistic approach were presented and

discussed, leading to a slightly modified original

format.

The Internet mailing list was named “Netizen-

TV,” suggesting who were the main actors of the

show. The live program was open to the Netizens

who wanted to participate, speak out or observe the

program on that day. The room was not an ordinary

Page 29

TV studio, it was the main conference room of

GLOCOM, a nonprofit research institute in Tokyo

with the mission to study and build the next genera-

tion of Networked Society. There was a large screen

with a T1 connection to the Internet in the conference

room.

The center panel included: Dr. Shumpei Kumon,

expert in social systems study, particularly the

networked society and its historic, civilizational

context; Mr. Yasuki Hamano, a leading analyst and

practitioner in interactive digital media; Mr. Joichi

Ito, an Internet evangelist, almost American in his

worldview, head of PSI Japan and Eccosys, an

Internet service provider; Mr. Hiroyuki Kokubu, a 22

year old entrepreneur specializing in the testing and

evaluation of new video games before they appear on

the market and who is now forming his own company

to enter the broader Internet business arena; Dr.

Kazuhiko Nishi, President of ASCII corporation, who

originally introduced Microsoft into the Japanese

market and who is a strong advocate in personal

computing in Japan; Ms. Kaori Sasaki, President of

Unicul International, a multi-lingual communications

service company, a female entrepreneur who was

later invited to a special luncheon with Hillary

Rodham Clinton when the U.S. President came to

Tokyo in April. They represent a ‘new breed’ of

Japanese efforts towards the “Information Revolu-

tion.”

First Arrest on Cyberporn in Japan

The TV program began by reporting on an

incident that occurred just two weeks before. On

February 1, two people in Tokyo were investigated

by the police because of their illegal distribution of

hardcore pornography from their personal Web

pages. One defendant was actually a 16-year old

German high school student and the other was a

28-year old Japanese businessman. The businessman

was arrested the next day and later prosecuted for his

illegal redistribution of pornographic pictures taken

from newsgroups on the Internet. This was perhaps

the first, and is still the only, arrest of its kind in

Japan.

In Japan, showing or distributing hardcore

pornographic pictures in public is definitely against

the criminal code, even among adults. There is little

room to escape from being sentenced guilty once all

the evidence is presented. In Japan, Internet distribu-

tion of hardcore pornographic pictures is not un-

known. The two individuals in questions, however,

were less discrete than others.

They used the rental homepage server of an

Internet service provider called Bekkoame Interna-

tional that has the largest individual subscriber base

among providers in Japan. Bekkoame also became

the subject of the police investigation. The police

obtained a search warrant from the court and seized

all the related E-mail files addressed to the two

people as well as the hard disk containing the materi-

als used for the Web server. The police needed the

hard evidence. Here, the secrecy and freedom of

communication of using E-mail was sacrificed or

yielded to the “public interest” of keeping society

“clean.”

The police had received an anonymous tip two

months before the arrest. They evidently felt that

such activities could not be ignored and wanted to

demonstrate that distributing hardcore pornography

over the Internet is illegal in Japan. The two “distribu-

tors” became the symbolic victims to give a broader

warning to the society at large. Immediately after the

arrest was reported by the press, many pictures

including very legal ones simply disappeared from

Web pages and the Net traffic became fairly smooth.

Most of the panel members at the TV program

were very reluctant to accept the idea of government

regulating Internet contents. Nishi suggested some

software solution such as an automatic filtering of

undesirable pictures to children. Others like Joichi Ito

expressed strong concern about government intrusion

upon freedom of communication. Special guest

Ken’ichi Ozaki, President of Bekkoame, another

young entrepreneur, described how ignorant the

police were when they came in: they did not even

know that a ton of “illegal” material can be easily

accessed by merely clicking the button on the Web

pages that have links to the many adult-oriented

servers outside Japan!

To date, few, if any, protests have been made by

Japan’s Internet users groups or providers. The

challenge remaining to the Japanese authorities is not

to prove the defendants guilty, but to effectively

shut-out pornography from crossing the borders into

Japan via the Internet. What is against the law in

Japan is, in effect, not illegal in Cyberspace. There is

no effective legal or social system, at least at this

moment, to constrain these activities beyond one’s

border.

One is left wondering if this incident in Japan

Page 30

indicates that the Net culture is emerging mostly

among the American-dominated Western cultural

sphere of the globe and the Oriental and other

non-Western cultures remain closed within their

traditional norms. Does this case reflect a symbolic

challenge to our overall, international 20th century

modern society? How should we foresee the coming

of new culture and new society in a global perspec-

tive?

What Is A Netizen?

To answer these questions, we need to focus on

the concept of Netizen. The term “netizen” was first

coined by Michael Hauben in 1992 while he was a

sophomore at Columbia University in New York

City. He had been a very active user of the Net since

he was 14. After spending considerable time on his

local BBS (bulletin board system) and then with the

Usenet community, he became interested in finding

the roots of this community of people.

Hauben wrote: “What Is a Netizen? In conduct-

ing research online to determine people’s uses for the

global computer communications network (i.e., the

Net), I became aware that there was a new social

institution developing and I grew excited at the

prospects of this new social institution. In response to

the excitement I discovered from those who wrote me

(and which I also experienced), I felt that the people

I was writing about were citizens of the Net. Some-

times people on the Net would call users of the Net,

a net.citizen (read net citizen). This idea I trans-

formed into Net Citizen, which in shortened form is

Netizen. Netizens are Net Citizens who utilize the

Net from their homes, workplaces, schools, libraries,

or other locations. These people are among those who

populate the Net and make it a human resource.”

(See, http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/text/

WhatIsNetizen.html)

Netizens Put Into Historic Context

At my research institute GLOCOM, we found

Michael Hauben’s “Netizen” homepage via the

Internet index service Yahoo in late 1994. Dr.

Shumpei Kumon, Executive Director of GLOCOM,

read Hauben’s online papers and added further depth

from his own research to the term Netizen. According

to Kumon, a Netizen must have some historic roles.

Just like the citizens who were the main actors of the

social revolutions in France and elsewhere that

formed the basis of modern democratic society, the

netizens should play a key role in bringing a new

social system, using the Net as well as creating the

new networked society of the 21st century.

This revolution, according to Kumon, is a mixed

one. It should be first considered as “the third phase

of the Industrial Revolution.” It follows the first

industrial revolution of the late-18th century that was

brought about mainly by steam engines, textile

manufacturing, and railways. The second one oc-

curred in the late 19th century, and was fostered by

the steel industry, heavy chemical, and electrical

industries. He sees the third revolution as “complet-

ing” the industrialization of modern society, not

creating a new paradigm. At the same time, or per-

haps shortly after it is over, a newer and deeper social

revolution will also emerge, triggered by the third

industrial revolution and its completion, but it will

have much deeper consequences. This can be called

the “Information Revolution” as the third Social

Revolution following the first “Agricultural Revolu-

tion” and the second “Industrial Revolution.”

In this sense, we are preparing for the grand

social revolution by producing new actors, that is the

Netizens. We, ourselves, may not be fully qualified

as the genuine Netizens; our children and their

descendants will be the central force of the new

civilizational transformation. Whether one is born

“b.c. (before computers)” or “a.c. (after computers)”

makes a big difference. Likewise, before or after

networking will be the most critical difference in

carrying out the Information Revolution.

What seems to be the cultural gap between

Western and Eastern societies, as is shown by the

strict police charges in Japan against the Cyberporn

or similar tendencies found in Singapore or China,

could be regarded as more of the transitional conflict

between the ‘ancient regime’ of our very society and

coming ‘new regime’ initiated by the Netizens. The

Netizens will, over time, learn how to build and

operate a more comfortable society without disturb-

ing the harmony and dignity of people and their

community, be it real or virtual, as well as without

loosing the precious value of the Net that includes the

true freedom of communication and expression down

to the individual end users.

Where Do Netizens Emerge From?

Where do Netizens emerge from? A tentative

answer is “from the grassroots.” Let us examine this

observation.

Page 31

In Japan, typical grassroots activities by local

citizens using computer networks to create a new

community movement can be found in quite a few

places. One such case is COARA (Compunication of

O i t a Am a t e u r R e se ar c h A s so c i a t i o n ,

“Compunication” is a composite of computer and

communication) which started in May 1985 in Oita,

a local prefecture in Kyushu, the western-most island

of the Japanese archipelago. COARA was originally

planned as a local database service to provide busi-

ness-related information to local management and

business people. Soon they found that it did not work.

Not many people showed an interest in getting

company profiles or local sightseeing information

online – via 300 or 1200 bps text-only one-way

communication.

A few months after its start, a high school

student broke in and found that the small BBS was

almost dead. He was close to leaving, but stopped

and questioned himself: “The quality of a BBS is

defined by its users’ activities, and if I am a user then

I should contribute something that can interest the

others. What can I write that can satisfy these un-

known business people?”

This student, Masaharu Baba in a few weeks

started his monologue “High School Life Series”

online. He wrote of his daily life at High School –

how lonely the students felt, how distant the teachers

were, and one day he even disclosed his bad marks

on mid-term examinations. At first senior members

of COARA were highly skeptical about the real

intention of this strange kid. Then they gradually

realized that this is a real person, trying to communi-

cate on a peer-to-peer basis. Some started to send

e-mail to him saying “You shouldn’t spend too much

time online, you better study more for classes.”

Baba went on to disclose his more personal

story, his relationship with his mother, and so on. Six

months after he started to write regularly online, he

graduated from high school and joined a software

company as a programmer. He thanked to the mem-

bers of COARA as the first people who seriously

treated him as “real person” and listened to him. He

felt that this was the real kind of education missing in

school and he was only able to find it on the Net.

Through these and other trials and errors,

COARA members found that the fundamental value

of using an online network is the ability to communi-

cate with others. The two-way interaction made

possible by using computer networks was a real, new

means of interaction that these citizens never before

had. You can say anything you like at any time; no

matter how young you are, male or female, in a

professional field or not, crossing many physical and

social borders.

COARA recognized the importance of this

people-to-people, two-way communication early on

and shifted their project’s direction. In contrast, most

of the mainstream experts in Tokyo still believed that

Videotext online shopping and database services, all

one-way provisions of commercial information or

services, would become the core of then “new me-

dia.” Instead, as COARA began to demonstrate, the

citizens became both supplier and user of the infor-

mation they created and shared. These citizens had

started to formulate new kind of social institution, a

new community of people, as it began to be called, a

“Network Community” in 1987.

More than five years have passed and the

COARA members started their quest again. This

time, under the banner of “hypernetwork society,”

they looked into the future of the network community

or network society as a whole, made possible by the

marriage of high speed communications networks

and high powered personal computers, now known as

“multimedia networks.”

After several internal debates as well as techni-

cal, institutional and financial struggles, COARA was

finally able to connect to the global Internet in the

summer of 1994. It was one of the very first regional

networks to have full IP connectivity outside of the

academic and research networks in Japan. In 1994,

the World Wide Web was starting to grab everyone’s

attention. The Japanese Prime Minister’s office

started its Web homepage in August 1994 and the

White House’s debued its “Citizens’ Interactive

Handbook” homepage in October.

Yet COARA tried to remain a bit different. In

July 1994, COARA’s first homepage was opened,

with the banner saying “Citizens’ Diary.” The

COARA members wanted to preserve the culture of

their two-way, people-to-people communications

experiment by using the narrative and casual style of

writing and reporting. They did not like the institu-

tionalized and one-way style of some of the Web

pages run by serious organizations. For them, online

communications should be always casual, frank, and

people-oriented. One day some of their members

went to the then-Prime Minister Murayama’s own

small and very humble house in Oita city, took some

Page 32

digital pictures, and put them on the diary homepage.

A local policeman came to question these young

people, and his picture was also taken and soon put

online.

Other citizen members started their own individ-

ual homepages. It was then aggregated and titled

“One Person, One Homepage.” The governor of Oita

prefecture, Morihiko Hiramatsu is globally

well-recognized by his invention of the “One Village

One Product” movement to promote local industry

from the grassroots. The COARA members brought

this same idea to the Internet. Most of their individual

homepages still have a strong personal and communi-

cative nature thus giving the reader a sense of belong-

ing to a community.

How Netizens Emerge?

By observing how the people of COARA be-

haved, we see that they are quite genuine Netizens.

Computers are linked to connect people. The people

become open and form a kind of community, an

extension of their local community – many COARA

members are from outside Oita but feel that COARA

is their own home. Nobody really made any strong

decision to form a “virtual community” explicitly,

but it does firmly exist. It just emerged.

It can be safe to say that Netizens and their

virtual community emerged through continuous

people-to-people discourses online. It is made from

the bottom up. At first they didn’t set any clear

objectives. It was naturally built around self-organiz-

ing activities, with a dozen or two (but not more than

that) core enthusiastic members, or the Netizens.

Some new people join the core while others occa-

sionally leave with various reasons. They enjoy

“off-line” meetings most – COARA holds monthly

regular meetings and always has a party after.

These are typical characteristics of Netizens and

their virtual community that exists on the Net.

Howard Rheingold’s historic book Virtual Commu-

nity describes well the story of how he met with

COARA and witnessed how other cases, such as the

WELL (Whole Earth eLectronic Link) in San Fran-

cisco Bay Area or BBS groups in England are all so

similar in the nature of community building.

Language Barrier?

A culture is often defined by the language its

people use. People then often ask “is the Internet

dominated by English?” If so, most Japanese must

have difficulty in participating fully with the Net

culture. Quite often, a Japanese who doesn’t know

much about the Internet fears that his or her lack of

English skills will make it impossible to use the Net.

Globally speaking, it is true that the Internet is as

a whole an English-speaking community. Yet, if one

looks at it locally, many people are using their own

native language on the Net. One of the first things the

pioneers of the Net in Japan, such as Jun Murai, did

was to create software that can allow people to

handle Japanese character codes easily on the Net.

Only after making these daily tools available to the

majority of local people did the Japanese Net began

to grow.

In all aspects of life it is very unusual for Japa-

nese to communicate with each other in anything

other than their own language, and the Internet is no

exception. At least in the domestic sense, language

will not become an obstacle to the diffusion of the

Net. Unfortunately, there are still people who express

the potential danger that the Internet might damage

the culture and language of Japan.

Of course, one of the great strengths of the

Internet is its global connectivity. Here you need to

speak a common language and, now, English is by far

the most dominant. If Japanese (or any other non-

English speaking folks) want to keep up with what is

going on in the world, we have no choice but use the

language that other people of the world are using.

Unlike native English or other Roman-character-

based speakers, the Roman alphabet is still very

foreign to most Japanese. The distance between

English and German or Spanish is much less than that

between English and Japanese.

In one sense, this is clearly a cultural impedi-

ment to Japan’s global use of the Internet. Yet there

have been at least two occasions in history when

Japanese society was determined to learn and master

English. The first was in the 1850s, when U.S.

Admiral Perry demanded that the samurai-governed,

feudal Japan open the country to the world. The

second was, of course, when Imperial Japan lost the

Second World War in 1945 and the U.S. military

forces occupied Japan. Both times the Japanese not

only learned the language, but were able to adapt to

advances in the world, through hard work and inno-

vative efforts. It was a difficult but rewarding chal-

lenge, as history shows.

Page 33

Netizens To Open New Culture

The rapid spread of the Internet is not a military

occupation nor a cultural invasion. Opening up the

country to a networked world does not mean giving

up cultural assets. It is, to the contrary, an opportu-

nity to bring Japan’s own cultural contributions to the

world. It also opens the possibility for badly needed

change: perhaps Japan will become a less rigid, more

decentralized society, following the network para-

digm of the distributed nature of the Internet itself.

Like most other countries, today’s Netizens in

Japan still belong to the minority. They are less than

one percent of the whole population. They are more

individualistic, better-educated, and have higher

incomes than the average. Roughly 90 percent are

male, living mostly in urban cities. They love to

communicate and they are looking for buddies.

Sometimes they take each other too seriously and

become arrogant. Yet they like to do things for

others, as was shown right after the Kobe Great

Earthquake in 1995, when many online volunteers

gathered, and tried to help the victims. We know

these characters are not unique to the Japanese

Netizens at all, but this may have been the first

resounding shot, the Bastille Day of the Japanese

Information Revolution.

In Howard Rheingold’s book The Virtual Com-

munity, Joichi Ito, a Net pioneer and co-founder of

TWICS, one of the first Internet access providers in

Japan, is quoted as saying that the widespread use of

the Net could change the Japanese system for the first

time in thousands of years. Ito thinks it might cause

a kind of unprecedented allergic reaction in Japan.

No one doubts that Japan may need to go through

these “allergic” symptoms, but the results – a truly

internationalized Japan literally hard-wired to the

world – will be ultimately worthwhile. The Japanese

people have traditionally felt that they are isolated

geographically, surrounded by the seas, far from the

center of the world. Now if you can connect to any

other people in the world in relatively effortless,

prompt ways, using the Net, then this sense of isola-

tion will, at least over time, fade away.

Whether this will or will not really happen is

unknown. It is up to the first generation of Netizens

in Japan, perhaps together with Netizens in other

parts of the world. If any existing cultural force, no

matter which one it is, tends to dominate the entire

Net world too much, then the anticipated reaction

might become very negative, making the world more

fragmented, and in each fragmentation will exist

stronger central control. Freedom is not given. It only

becomes reality through people’s efforts and fights.

Not all Netizens are born equal, or rather alike.

They speak different languages with different geo-

graphic and cultural backgrounds. The Net, however,

can absorb and preserve these differences without

putting them into direct conflict. To keep the diver-

sity and to work together – that is the working princi-

ple of the Internet and from which today’s Netizens

should learn and grow. The world is getting more

diverse, thanks to the Internet, and the world is

getting closer and closer, again thanks to the network

of networks. Both chaos and conflict resolution are

possible on tomorrow’s Net.

______________________

Izumi Aizu

Institute for HyperNetwork Society

GLOCOM (Center for Global Communications)

International University of Japan

Haakusu Roppongi Building, 1F

6-15-21 Roppongi

Minato-ku, Tokyo 106

E-mail: [email protected]

Personal Homepage: http://az.glocom.ac.jp

http://www.glocom.ac.jp

_____________________

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aizu, Izumi. “The Emergence of Netizens: The Cultural Impact

of Network Evolution in Japan,” NIRA Review, Fall, 1995.

http://www.nira.go.jp/publication/review/95autumn/aizu.html

This essay describes how Japan was lagging behind the U.S. in

terms of Internet penetration and how Japan has been trying to

catch-up, starting around 1994, with some observations of

Japanese Internet user profiles, language barrier issues, and

concludes that over time the “virtual marathon” will have no

winners nor losers.

Bressand, Albert. Networld (a private report originally written

in English), translated into Japanese by Izumi Aizu, published

by Toyo Keizai Shimposha, 1991. Albert Bressand started an

independent nonprofit think-tank in Paris in 1985, to explore the

emerging societal forces around networking or “Networld.” His

vision of networking is the combination of human,

economic/financial, and technical/computer-wise, with such

unique concepts as “Infrastructure” plus “Infostructure” as well

as “Infoculture.”

Kumon, Shumpei and Aizu, Izumi. “Co-emulation: The Case for

a Global HyperNetwork Society” in Global Networks. Cam-

bridge: MIT PRESS, 1994. This paper is a chapter in an edited

book with more than 20 authors including Mitch Kapor and

Page 34

Howard Rheingold. Each author was given the theme of how

global networks will be shaped. Based on Kumon’s

“co-emulation” theory, Japan can and should try to accommo-

date the creativeness of Western individualism while still

maintaining her traditional cultural assets such as group orienta-

tion and team behavior. Aizu introduced one case history of

Japan’s computer networking community, COARA, a de-

cade-long, local-based grassroots citizens’ networking activity.

The writing process of this book required all the authors to use

Internet mailing lists for mutual discussion. (COARA can be

reached at http:// www.coara.or.jp)

Hauben, Michael. Mr. Hauben first coined the phrase Netizen.

He is forming a Neitzen association. In the fall of 1995, Mr.

Hauben visited Japan and GLOCOM. His homepage can be

found at: http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/

Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control. Addison-Wesley, 1994. This book

is about the complexity and the significance of biology to the

human culture and society. It is by far, I believe, the best

discourse linking the experiences of biology, technology, and

computer networking.

McGurn, William. “English Rising: Asia’s New Language of

Opportunity.” Cover Story, Far Eastern Economic Review.

March 21, 1996. pp.40-44. One of a number of articles appear-

ing in the Western press discussing the rising use of English in

international commerce. There have also appeared specific

articles on English on the Internet.

Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Community. New York: Simon and

S c h u s t e r , 1 9 9 4 h t t p : / / w w w . w e l l . c o m

/user/hlr/vcbook/index.html When Howard Rheingold was first

invited to Japan, he was asked to give a keynote talk at the first

“HyperNetwork Conference” in Oita, home of the COARA

citizens’ network. After the official program was all over, he

joined the COARA members’ party where he found so much

similarity among the networkers’ behavior and relationships

with each other and of the WELL, a San Francisco-based

networking community. That strange finding led him to write

this book Virtual Community. A whole chapter is devoted to the

history of computer networking in Japan. This book was

translated by Izumi Aizu into Japanese in 1995.

EDITORIAL STAFF

Ronda Hauben

William Rohler

Norman O. Thompson

Michael Hauben

(1973-2001)

Jay Hauben

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