Computer networks and the Internet: A brief history of predicting their future

The computer era began almost 70 years ago, in 1943, with the creation of ENIAC. The Internet itself is almost 40 years old, and the packet technology that underlies it goes back about another 10 years to the early 1960s. The relatively rapid emergence of this technology provides a very nice case study of how, over the years, visionaries, technologists, story-tellers and others have tried to look into the future and understand how computer networks would evolve, and what they would imply for the computer and for society. We do not attempt to retell here the complete history of the Internet; that story is told in a number of places, including (Abbate 1999) and (Hafner and Lyon 1996). We have explored the stages of the Internet’s emergence from a particular perspective— how people have attempted, with variable success, to foresee the future trajectory of the Internet. The early days—first there was the computer The story of computing usually begins with Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and John von Neumann. However, most of their contributions relate to the mathematical, organizational and mechanical principles that would enable a computing machine. Vannevar Bush provided one of the earliest visions about the power of computers to transform the way we work and think. In his paper titled “As we may think” (Bush 1945), Bush proposed the concept of a Memex, a device that could store all the documents used by a researcher, allow inter-document links and annotations to be added to these documents as they are studied and considered, and save all these associations so they could be retrieved later. This system anticipates the graphical tools used today for knowledge organization, and to some extent anticipated the links found in the World Wide Web. The vision is positive in outlook and brilliant in its anticipation. At the same time, it is worth noting what is missing: any idea that different people could link what is stored in their Memex systems. His vision of the Memex is a physical device, perhaps the shape of a desk, and the only way to share one’s stored information would be to invite another researcher to come sit at it. Each person would have his own Memex, and the exploration and structuring of knowledge is essentially an individual activity in his conception. One can speculate that the reason for this limitation in his vision is that while there were hints in 1945 as to how computing and storage might be realized, there were no such hints about communication. The technologies of the telephone and radio were very specialized, and dedicated to communication among people, not machines. Looking at the phone system, it may just have been too much of a jump to envision linking all the Memex together.