History of the internet

You may have thought that the development of the internet was a purely US affair. You’d be wrong. Before we go too far, let’s clarify our terms. The UK’s Tim Berners-Lee devised the overwhelmingly popular application of the internet, the World Wide Web. But, not the internet itself – the network upon which the World Wide Web runs.

No less an authority than Vint Cerf, co-author of TCP/IP and co-founder of the institutions that administer the internet, says you’d be wrong too. Cerf addressed an online seminar run by Archives of IT and BCS for over 300 attendees on 6 January 2022 and focused on the UK contribution to early work. The contribution of people in the UK was ‘absolutely essential’ to the development of the internet, Cerf says. UK con-tributions from the UK were ‘extremely important’ to its development.

Many of the Archives’ 200 interviews and 30,000 pages of publications support Cerf’s assertion, with details of work done by British engineers and articles charting the growth of its use. The Archives show that the UK contributed the first implementation of a packet-switched network, the basis of TCP/IP; the first implementation in the world of TCP/IP; and the first international node of the internet outside the USA.

The UK’s contribution to the history of the internet

The idea of switching packets and not circuits was first outlined and implemented by Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, Southwest London. He had joined NPL in 1947, and in the early 1960s was working on data communications, which he realised happened in bursts, quite unlike voice communications, which were at a steady rate.

Digital communications between computers were, therefore, typically over a line dedicated to a single connection which was then only used for a fraction of the available time. Better to split the data into ‘packets’, a term he chose after advice from a linguist, and send it over the line with other packets from other ‘conversations’. He outlined this in 1965 and the idea was floated by a colleague at a US conference in 1967 where it was taken up.

Alas, Davies died in 2000 before the Archives could capture his oral history but another interviewee, Ann Moffatt, recalled a meeting with Davies: ‘It was a special Computer Society talk, but held at the NPL and Donald Davies was working on what we later came to call packet switching, but we didn’t call it that then.

But the idea was to send packets of data across the world! Across England or across the world, using computers, sending files of data. On telephone lines. I mean this was just amazing that somebody was thinking about this, and I thought if we could merge together computers and telephone lines, gosh, that would open up just such an interesting life.’

Internet history and first implementations

And merge they did. TCP/IP was devised in the USA by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, having heard of Davies’ work at the 1967 US conference. Its first implementation in the world was in the UK at University College London (UCL) by Peter Kirstein CBE and colleagues.

Kirstein told the Archives: ‘Bob was my project officer, and Vint was a fairly junior professor at Stanford. They thought up this new internet protocol, and one part of anything like that was, you had to have implementations. So, the first of three implementations done was by this junior academic at Stanford called Vint Cerf, somebody in Bolt, Beranek & Newman, who were the people who actually provided the computers for the ARPANET, and myself, at least one of my people, or two, several of my people. And we had the first actual implementations between the three of us. So, we were doing the research on the internet from ’75 or so onwards.’

As Kirstein said: ‘Around about that time, ’76, ’77, there was a lot of standards work going on in Europe, and the British were part of that standardisation work. They did not approve of the ARPANET [the precursor of the internet] because they regarded that as an experiment, and although the academics liked it, and they tolerated it, they certainly didn’t regard it as mainstream, and were perfectly happy to have me connecting in the ARPANET, but they didn’t want people working on the internet side of things. So I was actually ordered to stop working on the internet protocols.

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‘I said I was sorry but my links to both the Ministry of Defence and the US were far too important. Whether they funded me or not, was their problem, but I was not going to stop working on it. So... I’m sure that sort of pressure went to others too. So, by the time the ARPANET was moving into the internet, I was the only person working on it, certainly in the UK, and probably in Europe.

'Which is presumably why I became known as the father of the internet, because in fact, we adopted the internet protocols in 1982, before the ARPANET did in general, not because I wanted to be a pioneer, but because my poor little PDP-9 computers were running out of power, and there were already the internet protocols working on the PDP-11s which were their successors, and I had lots of them.

'So, adopting the internet protocols for my services early, I could go on providing the service even though my computers were giving up the ghost. As a result, I found and experienced all these early problems, before the US people had to do it in earnest.’

Kirstein’s name and those of his colleagues at UCL is on a plaque in the USA commemorating those who made major contributions to the internet’s development:

Interviews in the Archives are littered with the experiences of engineers and entrepreneurs from the UK who built businesses on the internet as a vital communications infrastructure.

The Archives also has an extensive database of late twentieth century publications from, for example, Butler Cox, INPUT and System House. Looking back at a report he wrote for Butler Cox in 1989, Jim Norton, himself a pioneer of packet switched networking, observed: ‘Despite having highlighted the growing opportunities, the report entirely missed the potential for Internet Protocol (IP) to displace the public operator data solutions based around the CCITT “X Series” standards. ...

'In 1989 the internet was still very much a network of networks linking academic and research institutions and was rather ignored by the incumbent national operators and traditional telecommunications manufacturers. In the end Vint Cerf and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) won the standards battle hands down, aided subsequently by the development of the browser and the World Wide Web.’ Records of history not only remind us of what was happening 33 years ago but also how little we understood of what was to come!

It is noteworthy then that the UK had the foresight to establish in 2001 an institute dedicated to the internet, past, present and future: the Oxford Internet Institute, supported by a visionary whose name recurs throughout discussion of the history of computing and communications, Dame Stephanie Shirley.

As Professor Bill Dutton, founding director, explained in his interview, ‘I think it was the only major department at a major university that was anchored in the social sciences and focused on the internet. Even schools of communication and media studies were not looking at the internet at that time.’

Even then, not everyone understood that the internet had a future that would demand careful handling. You can follow the trail of this internet story and other UK contributions to the development of IT in over 200 interviews in the Archives and the publications for free at the Archives of IT.

Archives of IT is a UK registered charity (Number 1164198) that captures and tells the story of the people in tech industries for insight, interest and education.