The Amateur

Computerist

Spring 2004 Netizen Empowerment of 30

Anniversary of TCP/IP Volume 12 No. 2

Table of Contents

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

Netizens and Internet Governance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 4

International Origin of the Internet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 10

Emergence of Netizens in Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 60

Netizen Empowerment and the

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 communicate. 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

Webpage: http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/

Page 1

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 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 consider-

ation 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 considering 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

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Internet governance – public access for all, and participation in the

decisions 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

implementation. I would like to underline, in this respect, the issue of

public access and widening the scope of public engagement in deci-

sion-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 develop-

ing the Internet relied on the interactive participation and discussion

among those doing the research work, so the continuing governance of

the Internet requires the participation of netizens. A proposal to this

effect was submitted to the U.S. government in 1998 and was presented

in an English and French version in the Amateur Computerist.

On the 30

anniversary of the official publication 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 discussion

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

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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.articles/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/

Netizen Participation in

Internet Governance

ITU Workshop on Internet Governance

Geneva, February 27, 2004

Izumi Aizu

Deputy Directory,

Institute for HyperNetwork Society

[email protected]

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

tions Union held an experts workshop to address the question of Internet

governance. The following was presented as part of a panel chaired by

Robert Kahn.]

I have been involved with “Internet Governance,” 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 management in an open and inclusive approach. We advocated

the equal participation in the process and the body, eventually setup as

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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 Governance 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 suggest to you to take the

principles proposed there into serious consideration for the coming

debate. It would be more appreciated if this group gets formal recogni-

tion 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 transnational challenges that are difficult to solve

by applying the traditional “nation” based approaches.

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

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Frankly, most of the current International or intergovernmental

organizations were designed in the industrial age and not ready to deal

with these national 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 cooperation with the government, International organizations,

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

penetration 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 development

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 positive

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

sharing works among citizens. Compared with these, Domain Names

and IP address management is a far less serious problem, but we may

face more challenges.

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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

Afghanistan, 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 development 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 different, 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

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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 (sometime).

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 gover-

nance? 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 without 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 appropri-

ate 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 constrained 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 balance, not dominated

by large corporate interests, but adding non-profit, non-governmental

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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-making, e.g. in the case of

privacy protection. And if we rely too much on government or bureau-

cratic 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 pri-

vate-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

participation. In order to make effective participation of the Netizens

possible, it is necessary that their autonomous, distributed and collabora-

tive 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 challenging issues.

We also need self-certification mechanisms 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

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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 commitment, we, ICANN ALAC with other constituencies are

hosting a WSIS Workshop at the coming ICANN Rome meeting next

week. It will be on Mar 4, 2004, 11:00 a.m. to12:30 p.m. and it is open

to everyone. I hope many events like this will be organized 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 international 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 collabo-

rative research project which depends on and fosters communi-

cation across the boundaries of diverse administrative struc-

tures, 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

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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 networks, 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, espe-

cially France, at various junctures. These research groups did

the early development work. The Internet was international

from its very beginnings.

Preface

The following work in progress begins the investigation of the

collaboration between researchers 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 development 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 development

of an international network of networks, of the Internet, without the

international participation and collaboration to build the prototype and

the functioning 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

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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 20

century mention either computers or the

Internet. Rosenzweig, however, predicts that this will soon change. He

writes: “It is a fair guess that textbooks of the next century will devote

considerable attention to the Internet and larger changes in information

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 suggests 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 investigated

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,

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happen in all kinds of networks and communities. It also showed the

importance of protocols and introduced an example 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 countries.

The ARPAnet also supported the sharing of human

resources and enabled people to interact. But the computer systems had

to meet certain requirements, including permission from the U.S.

government 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)

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 develop-

ment 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

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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 difficulties 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 collabora-

tive 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 concepts. 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. (Spilling, 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

Page 14

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, included

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):

(Ho st)

( ) ( ) ( )

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

( ) ( ) ( )

(Ho st)

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 International Institute for Applied Systems

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

conference there, British researcher, Donald Davies writes: “To

Page 15

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 network

with an agreed protocol for message transport....” (Davies, “The Future

of Computer Networks,” 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 significant.

The IIASA is a research institute which supported 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 technologies 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 Informa-

tion Processing Organizations (IFIP), another British researcher, Peter

Kirstein presented a paper that described the collaboration between the

U.K. and the U.S. in networking. The paper included a diagram of the

satellite 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. networks.

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, Belgium, 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

Page 16

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

researcher from the GDR present at the 1975 workshop, 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 international 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 discus-

sions 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 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

Page 17

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) connected 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 definition 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 perspective. 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 interested in the ARPAnet from the beginning; it

Page 18

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 machinations,” 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. Norway con-

nection 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.)

Fortunately, the British Post Office (BPO) and NPL, two British

government organizations, came through with the promise of support.

Kirstein continues

: “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 initiatives were in pursuit of the

X.25 protocol suite and its upper levels. There was almost no European

Page 19

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 researchers to collaborate on resource sharing

network research. After an invitation to the Norwegian Telecommunica-

tions 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

computing 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 sabbatical 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 Norwe-

gian 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 Communica-

tions 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

Page 20

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 research-

ers who were rushing around or huddled in earnest discussions trying to

get everything 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 pro-

duce.” (Donald W. Davies, “Early Thoughts on Computer Communica-

tions”)

Lundh writes that he attended the ICCC conference on October 25

and 26, 1972. While at the demonstration, he was invited to attend a

meeting with other networking researchers from around the world held

after the ICCC’72 at the Comsat Corporation (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

Page 21

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 development.” (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 resources 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 (re-

search).” 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 convenient arrangement

for ARPA too.” (Lundh, E-mail, April 18, 2002) The TIP at NORSAR

was thus at a civilian facility, providing access for more widespread

Norwegian participation in networking research and facilitating

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

A problem the Norwegian group faced, according 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 resource sharing. “My reasons for wanting to participate

Page 22

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 difficulties, the Norwegian research group made an important

contribution to the development of TCP/IP and the Internet.

VI. – How to Communicate Across Network 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,” 7)

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 resource sharing computer communications

networking possible with different European sites. Two of the 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.

Page 23

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 Specifications 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 knowledge 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 members 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 Intercommunication” in the IEEE

Transactions on Communications. 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 University, 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.

Page 24

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 proto-

col.”(Cerf, The Final Report, IEN 151, 2)

When asked what he thought the term “philosophical 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 research 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 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

Page 25

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 activities 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 Spilling) 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 implementations,” Kirstein explains. (Kirstein, E-mail, May

20, 2002.) Describing this research, Spilling elaborates, “As I remember

the fellows at the Stanford 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

accepted 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 increasingly 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 Research Council and the Department of Industry. They had to

Page 26

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 interconnected

networks. It was their existence which allowed UCL to adopt a phased

approach to the adoption 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 explains 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 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

Page 27

assigned to his group, Spilling had a Ph.D. 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 recruited 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 Administration 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

permitting experiments involving contentious traffic situations. 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

“Commercial 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)

Page 28

IX. – Creating an Internet

The protocol suite that makes the Internet possible is known as the

TCP/IP protocol suite (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol).

Lundh explains the extensive effort needed to transform the design into

functioning protocol specifications. He describes the years of experi-

ments, 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 experiments.

Combinations of traffic types and requirements, 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 demands 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 robustness,

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’ laboratory.” This experimen-

tal process was closely intertwined 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

Page 29

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 networks 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 therefore will develop differently. Any

changes in existing networks in order to interconnect these, will be

costly and impeded by political factors. The obvious approach 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 development of the TCP

protocol was the international collaboration of researchers working

together on its development. Describing the role of this collaboration,

Lundh writes: “(T)he network technology was further refined and

developed in an intimate co-operation of ten research groups during the

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1970s. That co-operation resulted in the technology underlying 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-commercial research basis.

The earliest ARPAnet development 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 communication. 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 conference

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 telecommunication standards. (Lundh, 13)

According to Lundh, ten groups collaborated on developing the

TCP/IP protocols. The whole team, he explains, referred to itself as the

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“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 Technol-

ogy

9. UCL in London, England; University College London

10. NDRE in Kjeller, Norway; Norwegian Defence Research Establish-

ment

“The tone was open and could be heated although always friendly.

A certain amount of social occasions usually took place and stimulated

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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 pro-

grams.” (Lundh, 17) From 1977, the usual 2 day PSPWG was “supple-

mented,” 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 Bressler

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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 comput-

ers 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 networking was an impor-

tant 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 “intergalactic 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 cooperative, 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 responsibility for the welfare of the network instead of the

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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 understand-

ing 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)

Page 35

Kahn had worked on the BBN proposal to design the ARPAnet. He

was part of the BBN team to 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 development of the Internet. In an article

published in November, 1972, Kahn presents both human and computer

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 individuals 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 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 coopera-

tion.” (Kahn, “Resource Sharing,” 117)

In 1972, before the design of the TCP/IP protocol, Kahn proposed

that “a communication system not preclude the possibility that sepa-

rate... 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

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for internetworking communication. Also it was desirable to have the

internetworking process implemented outside of the individual networks

whenever possible (via gateways, 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 agreement of the participat-

ing 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

individual 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 develop-

ment 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 architecture,” 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

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available to all interested. Therefore, 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 architecture” 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 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 important 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

Page 38

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.” (p. 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 Communication,” PROC NTC, November 1979.

To make communication possible among differ entities, there is a need to have

some common conventions or agreements. 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

communicating 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

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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 Interconnection.”)

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

to Hawaii and one to Norway and England.” (Spilling, Research Proposal to NATO,

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 government for his

networking contributions to the Internet’s development.

Offering a description of the difficult environment that made solving this problem

even more challenging, Kirstein writes: “By 1973, many PTTs were pursuing packet-

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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 interconnection 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

meetings 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 Communications 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 subsequently with the Norwegian Telecommu-

nications Administration 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 revenue.”

“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.”

Page 41

“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 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

Page 42

station in Tanum, Sweden was opened to transmit the data via satellite. The transmis-

sion 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 appropriate 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 multi-computers.” 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 Laboratory, Remi Despres who was involved with the

French Reseau Communication par Paquet (RCP), and later with X.25 networking,

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)

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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)

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 Washington

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,

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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 Internet”

http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/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

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

Cerf elaborates, “In this case, the fuzzballs were functioning 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 gateways 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 interconnection” 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

Page 45

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, 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

Page 46

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 communication 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 university 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’ contribution, 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

Page 47

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 networking 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 experimental 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 September 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 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 interconnecting 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 communications 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 communica-

tions, thus the local networks are not aware of any internetwork activities. This is taken

Page 48

care of by the TCP’s in Host 1 and Host 2 and by the Gateway.” (Spilling, Proposal to

NATO, p. 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-

encapsulated it in the next networks packet structure. Of course, before we split IP from

TCP, it was just TCP packets that were encapsulated.” (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 optimized 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 develop-

ment in Germany, Italy or the U.K.” See also Kirstein, PT, et al. “SATNET Applica-

tions 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)

Page 49

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 Development of the ARPAnet” in Netizens and Ronda

Hauben, “Licklider” in Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History. Often, in

funding proposals, it seems that only computer resource sharing is referred to rather

than human communication 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 Communication – 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 Defense 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 Internetwork 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 Packet Radio Network,” IEEE Transactions on Communications, 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

Page 50

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 communica-

tion 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 networking 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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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 commercial British Post Office International Packet

Page 54

Switched Service(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 programming 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 successful. 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

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began in the seventies, when the German military became interested enough to ask their

‘Consultant 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 investigations, 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 communica-

tion network, to demonstrate its capabilities, 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 capitulation 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,

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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 favored British flavors, 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 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 communicate 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.,

Page 57

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 development 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

interconnect 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 mentioned, 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 experimenting 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 dismantled...and in parallel TCP/IP could be

used over SATNET. Once the ARPAnet links were dismantled, they had only the

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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 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

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

importance of Netizenship 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 Implications 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 February 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 discussion would be most

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suitable to the TV medium. Few respondents, if any, were specialists in

TV production. 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 interactive, 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 incorporate effectively

such external inputs into an ongoing broadcast framework. Rather, the

preceding discussion on the [Internet] mail list felt much more construc-

tive 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 Catastrophe” 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 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 generation of Networked

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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 world-view, 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 toward the

“Information Revolution.”

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 distribution of hardcore pornographic

pictures is not unknown. The two individuals in questions, however,

were less discrete than others.

Page 62

They used the rental homepage server of an Internet service

provider called Bekkoame International 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 materials 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 “distributors” 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 indicates that the Net

culture is emerging mostly among the American-dominated Western

Page 63

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 perspective?

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 conducting 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. Sometimes people on the Net

would call users of the Net, a net.citizen (read net citizen). This idea I

transformed 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

Page 64

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 21

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-18

century that was

brought about mainly by steam engines, textile manufacturing, and

railways. The second one occurred in the late 19

century, and was

fostered by the steel industry, heavy chemical, and electrical industries.

He sees the third revolution as “completing” the industrialization of

modern society, not creating a new paradigm. At the same time, or

perhaps shortly after it is over, a newer and deeper social revolution will

also emerge, triggered by the third industrial revolution and its comple-

tion, but it will have much deeper consequences. This can be called the

“Information Revolution” as the third Social Revolution following the

first “Agricultural Revolution” 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 descen-

dants will be the central force of the new civilizational transformation.

Whether one is born “b.c. (before computers)” or “a.c. (after comput-

ers)” makes a big difference. Likewise, before or after networking will

be the most critical difference in carrying out the Information Revolu-

tion.

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 disturbing 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.

Page 65

Where Do Netizens Emerge From?

Where do Netizens emerge from? A tentative answer is “from the

grassroots.” Let us examine this observation.

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 Oita

Amateur Research Association, “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 business-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 communica-

tion.

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

unknown 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 communicate 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 members 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

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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

communicate 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 media.” Instead, as COARA began to demonstrate, the citizens

became both supplier and user of the information 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 communica-

tions networks and high powered personal computers, now known as

“multimedia networks.”

After several internal debates as well as technical, 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

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casual style of writing and reporting. They did not like the institutional-

ized 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 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 individual 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 communicative nature thus

giving the reader a sense of belonging to a community.

How Netizens Emerge?

By observing how the people of COARA behaved, 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-organizing 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 occasionally 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 Community describes well the story of how he met with COARA

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and witnessed how other cases, such as the WELL (Whole Earth

eLectronic Link) in San Francisco 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 Japanese 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 impediment 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

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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 innovative efforts. It was

a difficult but rewarding challenge, as history shows.

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 opportunity 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 paradigm 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 Community, 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 geographi-

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cally, 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 isolation 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 geographic and cultural backgrounds. The Net,

however, can absorb and preserve these differences without putting them

into direct conflict. To keep the diversity and to work together – that is

the working principle 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/publi-

cation/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,

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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. Cambridge: MIT PRESS, 1994. This

paper is a chapter in an edited book with more than 20 authors including Mitch Kapor

and 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

accommodate the creativeness of Western individualism while still maintaining her

traditional cultural assets such as group orientation and team behavior. Aizu introduced

one case history of Japan’s computer networking community, COARA, a decade-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 appearing 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 Schuster, 1994

http://www.well.com/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

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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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