From the Telegraph to ARPANET. “Alternative” Networks, Counter Culture, the Internet, and “Virtual Community.”

ARPANET, “Alternative” Networks, Counter Culture,
the Internet, and “Virtual Community”

Trebor Scholz
Thursday, September 9, 2010

The Victorian Internet
by Tom Standage (1989)

1746 200 monks
Jean‐Antoine Nollet linked to electrical battery
1797 optical telegraphy

telephone, radio, ...


1945


"knowledge on call"

hyperlinked pages and the “memex”

http://tinyurl.com/39mf8l

http://tinyurl.com/3b7h9v


In 1949 in his novel Heliopolis, the German Ernst Junger dreams up the
communication medium "Phonophor," which connects everybody to
everybody else, enabling a permanent , technically facilitated forum that
also replaces the passport, watch, newspaper, library, and encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger
http://tinyurl.com/2s2zn5


upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Girl_listenin


[A]ctivation; authorship; community ‐‐ are the most frequently cited motivations for almost all artistic
attempts to encourage participation in art since the 1960s." according to art historian Claire Bishop.


Blog: http://blog.sfmoma.org/tag/art‐of‐participation/
Flickr set: http://www.Zlickr.com/photos/ari/sets/72157610572023159/


1957


Excerpts from chapter 2, and 5 “Sputnik: DeclassiZied” (2007)
http://www.netZlix.com/Movie/Sputnik_DeclassiZied/70086393


http://www.Zlickr.com/photos/nezitic/311892760/sizes/o/
Red Flag Over Reichstag 9th May 1945


The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2QdEj8UjBc


1961


Leonard Kleinrock, MIT
"Information Flow in Large
Communication Nets"
(May 31, 1961)

First paper on packet‐switching
http://tinyurl.com/23nbat


1962


Packet Switching, Paul Baran 1962 at RAND, US Airforce

All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all
other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate,
pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would
be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed.
Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and
end at some other specified destination node.

http://tinyurl.com/2ry3lo

“On Distributed Communication Networks,” March 1964
c) a network without central authority or single
Paul Baran
outage point

http://tinyurl.com/ywq8nk


1965


Ted Nelson coins the term "Hypertext" in "A File Structure for the
Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate". 20th National
Conference, New York, Association for Computing Machinery


1965

Already in 1965, Fernando Corbato and his colleagues at
MIT developed a program to allow individual users to
swap messages on one single computer.


1967


Excerpts from: American Experience | Summer of Love | PBS
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/love/


People’s Park ‐‐ Excerpt from “Berkeley in the Sixties”
http://akas.imdb.de/media/rm1389337600/tt0099121


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQbEjPzfDmc&feature=PlayList&p=C97DC8509C17275A&index=2

Macy conferences 1946‐53, NYC video: 10 mins


Excerpts from: The Commune (2005)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439511/


1968


"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine
than face to face...We believe that we are entering into a technological age, in which we
will be able to interact with the richness of living information -- not merely in the passive
way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as active
participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through our interaction with
it, and not simply receiving something from it by our connection to it. (53)"

http://tinyurl.com/2c9uaf


Louis Pouzin designed and directed the development of
the Cyclades network in France, which then stopped in
1974.
http://tinyurl.com/22ykun


1969


In 1968, ARPA sent out a Request for
Quotation to build a network of
four Interface Message Processors.
BBN made it.
Dave Walden, Bernie Cosell, Severo Ornstein, Will Crowther, Bob Kahn

1969: Advanced Research Projects Agency
commissions ARPANET to conduct research
on networking.

First ARPANET nodes connected UCLA,
Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and
University of Utah

http://tinyurl.com/yuw6ho
http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn
http://tinyurl.com/2ujdes


Norm Abramson wanted to surf - so he moved to Hawaii in
1969. He wanted to network with the other islands and so he
built the ALOHAnet in 1970.

From the University of Hawaii, Abramson connected
computers over a network of radio transmitters using a
protocol telling the computers how to share the airwaves.

http://tinyurl.com/yvvmdc

Trebor Scholz |


The Internet in 1969
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0pPfyYtiBc&e


http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php


1970


TCP/IP

With TCP/IP, the "global network" was
becoming a reality. Universities and
government offices were using the
network for communicating with
colleagues and exchanging data.

1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet
Network Interconnection", which specified in detail the design
of a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
http://tinyurl.com/3c64vm
http://tinyurl.com/yvvmdc


Whose Standards? Proprietary or Open Standards?

Also the fax machine is only useful if many other people have it.
Later: If the Internet would have just connected supercomputers,
it would have not been as significant.

Trebor Scholz | http://tinyurl.com/yu7g2m


http://tinyurl.com/29vvar
PowWow

Throughout the 1970s Instant Messaging began to appear


•There was no single inventor of the Internet.
•ARPANET, Usenet, BITNET, and BBS
•DARPA was not solely a response to the fear of a nuclear
armageddon.


1971


http://tinyurl.com/34gyk2

1971: Ray Tomlinson of BBN creates email program to send
messages across a distributed network.

1972: Tomlinson expands program to ARPANET users, using
the "@" sign as part of the address.


Michael Hart

1971. Project Gutenberg is the first and largest
single collection of free electronic books, or
eBooks.

Project Gutenberg is the
"oldest digital library built on volunteer
efforts to digitize, archive, and distribute
cultural works."

http://tinyurl.com/26zq8z

Trebor Scholz |


1977


http://tinyurl.com/35drka

http://tinyurl.com/2n5gvy

1977 Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw created the first MUD
(Multi-User Dungeon) leading later to MMORPG


1978


CBBS (first BBS) January of 1978, Chicago was hit by
Ward Christensen the Great Blizzard of 1978

Many people did not have the Internet. They dialed in to CBSS directly via modem.
Users had to take turns accessing the system, each hanging up when done to let
someone else have access. Nevertheless, the system was seen as very useful, and ran for
many years and inspired the creation of many other bulletin board systems.

http://tinyurl.com/38zf8q
http://tinyurl.com/3a8wru


ASCii art on BBS

http://tinyurl.com/yukqdk

1979


Emoticons

1979 Kevin MacKenzie e-mailed his
fellow subscribers at MsgGroup, an
early Internet bulletin board, with a

suggestion to put some emotion back
into the dry text medium of e-mail.
(The eyes came later.)


USENET established. USENET was a global, decentralized,
distributed Internet discussion system that provided mail
services and file transfers. Precursor of GoogleGroups and
other discussion boards.
http://tinyurl.com/2mdk3z


ARPANET
http://echo.gmu.edu/usenet/images/usenet.gif

http://www.sri.com/about/timeline/images/map.gi

Trebor Scholz |


1980s


What else did it take to make this WWW work?

http://tinyurl.com/2km2n9

This was the ﬁrst IBM PC introduced on Aug 12, 1981

Douglas Engelbart

http://tinyurl.com/3c7suu


The Well members could start discussion boards:
Mid-80s
the most popular one was dedicated to
computer manufacturers push proprietary protocols,
The Grateful Dead.
which failed

US Government pushed for ISO but TCP/IP was free, more viral

In the 1980s the PCs entered homes and offices in the United States.


The Well members could start discussion boards:
the most popular one was dedicated to
The Grateful Dead.

1981 BITNET release
Ira Fuchs (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman (Yale)
Main features: email, LISTSERV

BITNET set expectations for free access and openness: it charged by
bandwidth. Once you paid for the line, how much you use it was up
to you. Others tried to establish a pay by byte system.

http://tinyurl.com/2vxZbj
http://tinyurl.com/2cl3go


1985
Stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant
one of the first community bulletin board systems
The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (The Well)

Brand used a networked PC on his houseboat in Sasalito, CA, claiming that he did so in
order to experience commune living without actually moving into one.

http://tinyurl.com/374e2g


1984


Francois Lyotard and Thierry Chaput’s exhibition "Les Immateriaux” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. 30 artists collaboratively respond to 50 terms related the topic of the "immaterial."
Lyotard and Chaput pointed out that they were mainly interested in the way, in which this collaborative writing changed the experience of the act of writing itself.

http://tinyurl.com/ynkmby

Trebor Scholz |


Trebor Scholz
The New School University

scholzt@newschool.edu

Twitter: trebors

This presentation is made public using the creative commons attribution, non‐
commercial, share alike license.

This presentation is based on my previous courses on the topic including:
http://www.slideshare.net/trebor/how‐the‐social‐web‐came‐to‐be‐part1


From the Telegraph to ARPANET. “Alternative” Networks, Counter Culture, the Internet, and “Virtual Community.”

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From the Telegraph to ARPANET. “Alternative” Networks, Counter Culture, the Internet, and “Virtual Community.”