The Tech Witch Explains the beginnings of the Internet.

People can now understand why other people say I may not be the most stable human in the world.  

Dee, really you are going to sit here and explain how the internet works when it's just this huge collection of millions of people's thoughts, feelings, concepts, and ideas?

Yes.  Because procedurally it's a different thing entirely.

The Internet is at its base level, a network of networks.

Let's talk a little about how the internet started, where it's going, and why it's obsessed with Digitial watches.  (remember kids, plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. ;) )

You can't talk about internet history without talking about ARPANET.

Explained simply, ARPANET is the internet's smaller, more withdrawn older brother who enrolled in the Armed Forces.  It was developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.  Its job was to network a few different resources together, at first, to help aid in speeding up research on topics pertinent to Defending the United States from threats.

                                            This is kind of what a network map looks like.  Dramatized

                                            For drama!

The idea of networking computers that were off-site to each other was intriguing but no one had ever done it before.  There were many hurdles that had to be jumped before this could happen.  When the project started in 1966, the first thing that had to be established was a way for computers to send information back and forth remotely.  The information would be called a "Packet", and the process was called "Packet Switching".

This was done through our old friend Internet Protocol TC/PIP Version 4.  What this protocol does is assigns a numeric value (numbers) as an internet address.  The numbers were configured based on what kind of computer was accessing the network, what kind of network it came from and a host of other distinguishing features.  It works great for a small network of machines because you're not likely to run into 2 computers that have the same attributes all the way through... You can imagine however how troublesome this became when more and more computers started entering the network.

This is why many companies are moving to the Internet Protocol IP version 6 standard.  These IP addresses are longer, a bit more descriptive, and able to take on many, MANY more individualized addresses.  They are still mostly made of numbers, but there is a lot more room for variance.

IPV4 has been the standard since 1969 however, it is still the standard today due to the inability of some devices to make that last jump.  

This was my first Computer, it was gifted to me by my Elementary school due to my learning disability.

Your network is only as secure as the weakest link, and we still have some REALLY old machines hanging out on the internet. I'm not just talking about Grandma Maude's computer running Windows 95, I'm talking about infrastructure.  In other words, the machines that report into Grandma Maude's Windows 95 machine, and, well heck, your machine too!

But that's a tangent, back to the rest of the explanation.

Packets were simplified pieces of information that all computers could understand.  They included a header, (notes explaining what the packet was to do) and a payload (the actual information needed.)  According to The Science Museum in London, the first packet was successfully transferred in October of 1969.

(Here is a link to their article)

The Original BAMFs

From there, in 1981 the National Science Foundation started throwing some money around.  The first place they started throwing money was to many large universities to expand their supercomputing abilities.  This meant the NSF was bankrolling for these universities to start taking the study of computers more seriously.  The NSF also started funding and backing the idea of networking these supercomputer areas at universities to one another with a network known as CSNET.

ARPANET was officially decommissioned in 1990 after the private sector started investing in their own networking technologies.

Essentially, ARPANET combined with CSNET was the proof of concept needed for the private market to also start taking computing and networking as a serious way to make money.  Because everything comes right down to the free market when you look at it.

CERN, better known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, brought the web to the public domain on April 30th, 1993.  

I was 13 years old.  I am older than the internet, and most likely if you are reading this on a blog, you are too.  Welcome to the club!

Many of my friends were early adopters of the internet, as I was brought up in a middle-class midwestern home.  It was not incredibly expensive to pick up internet service back then, but it was beyond what many below the poverty line could manage.  It also was not widely used yet.  Although 1 smartphone existed back then, the Simon Personal Communicator by IBM, it was prohibitively expensive to the average person.

My Dad was one of the first on our block to even have a mobile phone, or a "Car" Phone as they came to be called back then.  It looked like this:

My Father primarily used his for emergency work calls, since he was a Home Healthcare Nurse and was often on call.  It was not an internet faring device.

Being a teenager in the time of the ramping up of the internet was an interesting time.  My generation was the first generation to know the convenience of not having to speak to another person to get things done.  We could return bottles to a machine instead of a person (if you went to the right grocery store).  We could find information just by typing it into Yahoo or Alta Vista!  You could basically rely on that information to be decent or accurate because well, the internet was largely unpopulated.  Heck, major companies didn't even have websites back then for the most part!  Google didn't even exist until I was in college.

The internet, at first, remained a place for research.  Many Universities had websites that instead of exalting the benefits of going there, would instead publish their unfounded research and allow others to jump on and make observations about it.  I had a good friend who would go to the CDC's FTP site, download diagrams of virus variants, and try to identify on his own how the variants were actually different from one another.

My second job ever was working for the Detroit Science Center Gift Shop in Wonderland Mall.  I was a cashier and I also monitored our internet cafe in the back room, occasionally running presentations, but mostly making sure kids weren't going on pornographic sites, which seemed to emerge on the internet almost on day 1.

Many people back then were more interested in chatting than doing research, because our computers had a block on most chatting sites, our little store didn't do so well after a while.  We operated much like drug peddlers, we offered an hour of free internet research, then 8 dollars per hour after that.  (Almost 14 bucks in today's money.)

People weren't going to pay that kind of money to do research at the mall.  They just weren't.

Since then, I've understood the correlation between poverty and technology.  If you don't have money, you don't have the technology.  It's more important to eat than to be able to research anything at any time.

This is why I started offering low cost IT services from the start of my business in 2019.  I felt it was incredibly important to make sure that everyone who wants access to the internet can gain access to it.

I understand that those who haven't been as lucky as I still needed to understand how to use the Internet as the powerful tool it is.  Sometimes I can teach folks over a few sessions and get them up to speed on what they need to know, sometimes it takes more time than I can provide.  

I feel that this kind of education is the number 1, MOST important service I can provide to my fellow humans.  However, as a business model, it doesn't support survivability very well.

As I'm always saying though, that's not the point of the exercise.  The point is to empower others to be able to take the steps they need to take to do for themselves what others cannot or will not do for them!

The Internet should be available to everyone.  No matter what their background is, and that's what Tech Witch Tips is about!

See you all tomorrow for another Tech Witch Tip!