Credits
PLATO
PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) originated in the early 1960s as a distributed computer-based learning system at the University of Illinois and was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system.
Credit: Courtesy University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Cray Operator
A computer operator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) makes adjustments to a CRAY-1 supercomputer in the mid to late 1970s. The CRAY-1 machine provided NCAR with invaluable computing for its early efforts in tropical numerical weather prediction. Researchers across the country were beginning to see the potential of using computer networks to access these large and powerful machines from remote locations.
Credit: © University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
Floppy Disks
A floppy disk, also known as a floppy, diskette, or simply disk, is a type of disk storage composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic enclosure lined with fabric that removes dust particles. Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive (FDD).
Credit: Courtesy of Hans-Werner Braun
NSFNET T1 Backbone and Regional Networks, 1991
This image is a visualization study of inbound traffic measured in billions of bytes on the NSFNET T1 backbone for the month of September 1991. The traffic volume range is depicted from purple (zero bytes) to white (100 billion bytes). It represents data collected by Merit Network, Inc.
Visualization by Donna Cox & Robert Patterson, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A New World
Credit: Credit: © 2007 Jupiter Images Corporation
Computers Begin to Transform the World
UNIVAC promotional film.
Credit: Roger Wade Productions
Cold War Raging
An artist's illustration of a Nike missile intercepting a Soviet aircraft. Deployed throughout the United States and Western Europe in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Nike missiles were intended to stop Soviet aircraft before they could drop their nuclear bombs. The Nike systems were an example of both the high-tech nature of the U.S.-Soviet arms race and the serious threat posed by nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
Credit: U. S. Army
What About a Computer Network?
A researcher checks the output of a Control Data Corporation CDC 3600 computer in the mid-1960s at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. During this time, scientists began working on networking technology that would allow these powerful but immobile machines to be used by researchers in remote areas.
Credit: © University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
ARPANET
The ARPANET Team in 1969.
Credit: Courtesy of Frank Heart
Leonard Kleinrock
Credit: IEEE GLOBECOM 50th Anniversary Commemorative Lecture, courtesy of IEEE Communications Society
Vint Cerf and the Development of ARPANET
Credit: Cliff Braverman, Dena Headlee, Lauren Kitchen and Dana Cruikshank for National Science Foundation
Computing Grows in Importance
Office workers check the printer output on an IBM Model 138 computer. Introduced in 1976, the Model 138 was similar to other computers introduced in the mid-1970s–faster, more powerful, and easier to use than previous computers. As a result, more and more companies began using computers to speed up their operations and improve their efficiency.
Credit: IBM Archive
First Email
This photo shows the two computers that sent and received the first email message using the ARPANET. The computer in the background, the BBN-TENEXB, sent the message received by the BBN-TENEXA computer in the foreground. The teletype machine on the left was a Teletype KSR-33 terminal that printed the first email.
Credit: © 1971 Dan Murphy
Visualization
A computer-generated global weather model created by Warren Washington in the 1970s. Around the world, computer scientists and researchers saw the power and potential that computer networking had to speed collaboration and share powerful computing resources.
Credit: © University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
GARP
An illustration of the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP). Developed in the 1970s by the Global Atmospheric Research Program, GARP used a network of earth-bound sensors, satellites, and research centers to study global atmospheric circulation. It was one example of how researchers were using the power and promise of networking to approach complex scientific concepts and challenges.
Credit: © University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
Campus Computer Networks
During this time, several universities began building their own computer networks to aid research. George Strawn, a Chief Information Officer at NSF, was a computer scientist at the University of Iowa in the 1970s. He and colleagues at other universities saw the potential that computer networks had to offer as they began to use email and other innovations.
Computers Get Personal... Powerful
Credit: NSF
TCP/IP Sets the Standard
Diagram showing the core of the Internet in August 1987. In a few short years, ARPANET would cease to exist, and the NSFNET backbone would become the center of the Internet.
Credit: Courtesy of BBN Technologies
The Demand for New Networks
Credit: NSF
NSFNET is Born
Credit: NSF
Private-Public Innovation
Credit: Courtesy of Hans-Werner Braun
NSFNET Grows a Backbone
Credit: Courtesy of Hans-Werner Braun
The World is Online and Caught in the Web
Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, developed a new tool for sharing information on the Internet using hypertext that he called the World Wide Web.
Credit: © CERN
The Tools to Untangle the Web
The growth of the Web helped expand the Internet out of the academic arena and into the rest of society.
Credit: Courtesy of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Public-Private Partnership Pays Off
The decisions made by NSF back in the 1980s to shape how NSFNET would operate and grow were crucial to its growth in the 1990s.
Credit: Donna Cox and Robert Patterson, courtesy of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
New Industries, New World
With the NSFNET structure providing a stable platform and the World Wide Web providing an easy way to share data on it, the commercial side of the Internet grew in ways that were unimaginable just a few years earlier.
Credit: NSF
NSF Looks Ahead
Although NSFNET was decommissioned in 1997, NSF continued to support technologies that helped make the Internet what it is today.
Credit: Photodisc Blue, Getty Images
A New World
By the time the new millennium came, the Internet had truly transformed the world. Hundreds of millions of people had come online and the private sector had laid millions of miles of high-speed fiber optic cables across the globe.
Credit: © 2007 Jupiter Images Corporation
Web 2.0 — Interactive and in Our Lives
The World Wide Web has become truly interactive in the past five years or so, creating a phenomenon some call Web 2.0. Since the turn of the century, the number of homes and businesses with broadband Internet connections has grown exponentially.
Credit: Luca Cremonini, railsonwave.com
Internet2 — Back to the Lab
Developers at the NCHC Access Grid node test the SARS Grid network links. Grid-computing researchers around the Pacific Rim mobilized to fight the SARS epidemic by helping to establish a cutting-edge communication network, called the Access Grid, among quarantined hospitals across Taiwan.
Credit: National Center for High-performance Computing, Taiwan
The Future?
So, in twenty short years, the Internet has gone from a few networked labs and universities to a multi-layered network connecting hundreds of millions of people. What will the next twenty years hold?
Credit: NSF
Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations presented in this material are only those of the presenter grantee/researcher, author, or agency employee; and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.