1989

If you love mass society you’ll love the internet. It’s really massive.

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[Very few people were aware of the developments taking place among academics, electronic engineers, and military technocrats circa 1969–1989. But in the latter year, with the advent of ISPs (see below), suddenly we commoners were able to get online. When that happened, some viewed it as potentially democratic/decentralized and therefore liberatory. What really should have been obvious, in the kind of society we live in, is that it would quickly become the most massive, noisy, and obnoxious platform for commercialization in history.]

In the 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense funded research into time-sharing of computers. ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the University of California, Los Angeles and SRI International in New Jersey on 29 October 1969. A later third site was at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah. In a sign of future growth, 15 sites were connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971. Thereafter, the ARPANET gradually developed into a decentralized communications network, connecting remote centers and military bases in the United States.

Connections were made in 1973 to the Norwegian Seismic Array and to University College London which provided a gateway to British academic networks forming the first international resource sharing network. ARPA projects, international working groups and commercial initiatives led to the development of various protocols and standards by which multiple separate networks could become a single network or “a network of networks.” In 1974, Bob Kahn at ARPA and Vint Cerf at Stanford University published their ideas for “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.” They used the term ‘internet’ as a shorthand for internetwork.

Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation funded the Computer Science Network. In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States.