The History of The First Social Network

Have you ever wondered where it all began in regards to Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, or Tinder? Well reader you are about to find out! The Foundation of information systems along with information technology(IS/IT) begins with the Internet that got its background from the partnership among three distinct but elite groups: elite Universities, the U.S.A Military, and private corporations. These three elite organizations synchronized in order to form the military-industrial-academic complex. The creation of this triangular alliance between our government, private industry, and academia is one of the uppermost significant creations that helped carve the outcome of the technological revolution of the twentieth century.

The individual to give the most credit for making this triangular alliance is Vannevar Bush, who was a professor at MIT. Bush was well suited for this task because he was the key figure in all three groups: dean of the MIT School of Engineering, a founder of the electronics company Raytheon, and America’s top military science administrator during World War II, he had the most lead way with all three groups as well as the necessary skills to take on the task. When looking for the father figure of thee Internet, the person to look at would be Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider(lick). Licklider established the two most important concepts regarding our Internet today. The decentralized networks that allowed the circulation of data from anywhere, and interfaces that could facilitate human to machine interaction with real time, something in particular that hadn't been done before. Both fundamental concepts utilized with information system and information technologies.

Licklider collaborated with the artificial intelligence pioneer John McCarthy to assist in devolping systems for computer-time sharing. Computer-time sharing allowed a lot of terminals to be connected up to the same mainframe, so that many users could type in commands directly and get a response almost instantly. It was a key step toward a direct human-computer partnership or symbiosis. Bob Taylor was aware that he would have to sell the time sharing network idea to the individuals that it was meant to help. He took affirmative action in the matter and invited them to assemble at the University of Michigan on April 1967, where he got Larry Roberts to present the idea.

The sites would be linked, Roberts explained, by leased phone lines. He described two possible architectures: a hub system with a central computer in a place like Omaha that would route information, or a weblike system that looked like a highway map with lines criss-crossing as they were spun from place to place. Roberts and Taylor had begun to favor the decentralized approach; it would be safer. The data could be moved along from node to node until it reached its destination. The network would be managed by standardized minicomputers, which became known as Interface Message Processors(IMP's). Later we would simply call them “routers.” At a follow-up conference in Gatlinburg Tennessee on October 1967, Roberts presented his updated plan for the network. He also gave it a name, ARPA Net, which later morphed into ARPANET.

There are various ways of sending information through a network. The simplest is known as circuit switching, is the way a phone system does it: a set of switches creates a committed circuit for signals to go back and forth for the extent of the conversation, and the connection remains open, even during long pauses. Another method is message switching or, as the telegraph operators called it, store-and-forward switching. An even more efficient method is packet switching, a special type of store-and-forward switching in which the messages are broken into bite-size units of the exact same size, called packets, which are given address headers describing where they should go. These packets are then sent hopping through the network to their target by being passed along from node to node, using whatever links are most available at that instant. If certain links start getting clogged with too much data, some of the packets will be routed to alternative paths. When all the packets get to their destination node, they are reassembled based on the instructions in the headers.

Packet switching would become a fundamental tool utilized by the internet.One of the commonly accepted narratives of the Internet is that it was built to survive a nuclear attack. However according to ARPA director Charles Herzfeld, the Viennese refugee who approved Bob Taylor’s proposal of a time-sharing research network in 1965, “The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim” (Isaacson, 527). So which view is correct? In this case, both are. For the academics and researchers who were actually building the network, it had only a peaceful purpose. For some of those who were overseeing and funding the project, especially in the Pentagon and Congress, it also had a military rationale.

The ARPANET ended up representing an interesting conjunction of military and academic interests. It was funded by the Defense Department, which tended to want hierarchical command systems with centralized controls. But the Pentagon had delegated the design of the network to a bunch of academics, some of whom were avoiding being drafted and most of whom had a distrust of centralized authority. Even after the ARPANET morphed into the Internet in the early 1980s, it would continue to serve both a military and a civilian purpose.

The ARPANET was not yet the Internet we have today, it was just one small network. Within a few years, there were other packet-switched networks that were similar but not interconnected. In early 1973 Robert Kahn set out to fix that. There should be a way, he decided to allow all these networks to interconnect with each other, and he was in a position to make that happen. He made it his mission to create a method to connect them and other packet networks, a system that he and his colleagues began calling an “internetwork.” After a while, that word got shortened a bit, to “internet.”

What I found to be the most interesting is how the Internet has evolved into what it is today, nobody can imagine what life would be without it. The original ARPANET, was used as a information system engine for universities, government, along with the private corporations. However the ARPANET was limited to only one network and was not able to contact any other computers outside of its local network. Thus paving the way for the Internet to be born. Which allowed not only government and private corporations but all individuals to share data across networks. Therefore this would allow any businesses no matter how big or small the capability to use information systems and information technology for their business overall purposes.