"Bruce Sterling - Internet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

they were about long-distance computation.

It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an
ARPANET broadcasting technique in which an identical message could
be sent automatically to large numbers of network subscribers.
Interestingly, one of the first really big mailing-lists was "SF-
LOVERS," for science fiction fans. Discussing science fiction on
the network was not work-related and was frowned upon by many
ARPANET computer administrators, but this didn't stop it from
happening.

Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew. Its decentralized
structure made expansion easy. Unlike standard corporate computer
networks, the ARPA network could accommodate many different
kinds of machine. As long as individual machines could speak the
packet-switching lingua franca of the new, anarchic network, their
brand-names, and their content, and even their ownership, were
irrelevant.

The ARPA's original standard for communication was known as
NCP, "Network Control Protocol," but as time passed and the technique
advanced, NCP was superceded by a higher-level, more sophisticated
standard known as TCP/IP. TCP, or "Transmission Control Protocol,"
converts messages into streams of packets at the source, then
reassembles them back into messages at the destination. IP, or
"Internet Protocol," handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets
are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks
with multiple standards -- not only ARPA's pioneering NCP standard,
but others like Ethernet, FDDI, and X.25.

As early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to
link to ARPANET. ARPANET itself remained fairly tightly controlled,
at least until 1983, when its military segment broke off and became
MILNET. But TCP/IP linked them all. And ARPANET itself, though it
was growing, became a smaller and smaller neighborhood amid the
vastly growing galaxy of other linked machines.

As the '70s and '80s advanced, many very different social
groups found themselves in possession of powerful computers. It was
fairly easy to link these computers to the growing network-of-
networks. As the use of TCP/IP became more common, entire other
networks fell into the digital embrace of the Internet, and
messily adhered. Since the software called TCP/IP was public-domain,
and the basic technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its
very nature, it was difficult to stop people from barging in and
linking up somewhere-or-other. In point of fact, nobody *wanted* to
stop them from joining this branching complex of networks, which
came to be known as the "Internet."

Connecting to the Internet cost the taxpayer little or nothing,