Social History of New Media week2 ARPANET, “Alternative” Networks, Counter Culture, the Internet, and “Virtual Community”

Trebor Scholz

Histories of the Internet

week 2

Trebor Scholz

Required Readings: Abbate, Janet. “’The most neglected element:’ users transform arpanet.” Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1999.

Hafner, Katie. “Email.” Where wizards stay up late the origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Histories of the Internet

questions

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What are a few commonly held assumptions about the history of the Internet?

Which similarities and differences between the emergence of the Internet and earlier media like telegraph, radio, and television can you observe?

1797  optical  telegraphy

telephone,  radio,  ...

1746    200  monks  Jean-­‐Antoine  Nollet  linked  to  electrical  battery  

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (1989)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Braun_HF_1.jpghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television

1945

hyperlinked pages and the “memex”

"knowledge on call"

http://tinyurl.com/3b7h9v

http://tinyurl.com/39mf8l

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://tinyurl.com/2s2zn5http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger

[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.\lickr.com/photos/ari/sets/72157610572023159/

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

1957

http://www.net\lix.com/Movie/Sputnik_Declassi\ied/70086393Excerpts  from  chapter  2,  and  5    “Sputnik:  Declassi\ied”  (2007)  

Red  Flag  Over  Reichstag  9th  May  1945

http://www.\lickr.com/photos/nezitic/311892760/sizes/o/

The Advanced Research Projects Agency

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 outage point Paul Baran

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  |  PBSwww.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

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/2pxazn

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

http://tinyurl.com/2ujdes

http://tinyurl.com/yuw6ho

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

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

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

1970

http://tinyurl.com/yvvmdc

TCP/IP

http://tinyurl.com/3c64vm

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).

Also the fax machine is only useful if many other people have it.

http://tinyurl.com/yu7g2m

Later: If the Internet would have just connected supercomputers, it would have not been as significant.

Whose Standards? Proprietary or Open Standards?

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http://tinyurl.com/29vvarPowWow

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

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.

http://tinyurl.com/34gyk2

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

Michael Hart

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

http://tinyurl.com/26zq8z

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1977

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

http://tinyurl.com/35drka

http://tinyurl.com/2n5gvy

1978

CBBS (first BBS)Ward Christensen

http://tinyurl.com/38zf8q

January of 1978, Chicago was hit by the Great Blizzard of 1978

http://tinyurl.com/3a8wru

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.

ASCii art on BBS

http://tinyurl.com/yukqdk

1979

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.)

Emoticons

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

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

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

ARPANET

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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

http://tinyurl.com/3c7suu

Douglas Engelbart

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

Mid-80s computer manufacturers push proprietary protocols,

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 toThe Grateful Dead.

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

http://tinyurl.com/2cl3go

http://tinyurl.com/2vx\bj

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.

1985 Stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant one of the first community bulletin board systemsThe 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

1985 Stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant one of the first community bulletin board systemsThe 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

http://tinyurl.com/ynkmby

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.  

Trebor Scholz

Trebor ScholzThe New School University

scholzt@newschool.edu

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