2005 :: April 23 :: First YouTube Video

1992 :: July 16 :: David Clark Articulates Internet Creed

We Reject: Kings, Presidents, and Voting.
We Believe in: Running Code and Rough Consensus.

Prof. David Clark

On July 16, 1992, Prof. David Clark articulated what would become the creed of the Internet engineering community.  He was giving a presentation A Cloudy Crystal Ball: A Vision into the Future at the IETF.  It was era of turmoil and uncertainty as the privatization of the Internet (the transformation of the Internet from NSFNET to commercial networks) was in its infancy.

During his presentation, based on Prof. Clark's slides, he made a number of additional curious observations:

• Our best success was not computing, but hooking people together.
• The hacks of today are the commonplace of tomorrow.
• Security is a CRITICAL problem.
• What we should do: Fix insecure services: PASSWORDS
• The problem is assigning the correct degree of fear to distant elephants.
• If we have a problem it is due to too much success. 

1999, July 14 :: IANA Announces First Allocations of IPv6 Addresses

14 July 1999
From: IANA [iana@ISI.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 1999 12:32 PM
To: iana-announce@ISI.EDU
Cc: 'iana'
Subject: Delegation of IPv6 address space 

Internet Community, 

After much discussion concerning the policy guidelines for the deployment of IPv6 addresses, in addition to the years of technical development done throughout the Internet community, the IANA has delegated the initial IPv6 address space to the regional registries in order to begin immediate worldwide deployment of IPv6 addresses. 

We would like to thank the current Regional Internet Registries (RIR) for their invaluable work in the construction of the policy guidelines, which seem to have general consensus from the Internet community. We would also like to thank the efforts of the IETF community and the support of the IAB in making this effort a reality.

1998, July 14 :: Akamai files CDN Patent

In the 1990s, with the birth of the public Internet and the success of the World Wide Web, the network was experiencing high and peak demand resulting in significant congestion. Generally, each time content was requested by an end-user, the request would go across the backbones to the content host server, the content would be served and travel back across the backbones, and it would be delivered across the access network to the end user. When peak demand hit World Wide Web resources, content would become congested and some traffic would not get through (packet loss). In 1999, catastrophically demonstrating the problem of content delivery at that time, Victoria's Secret advertised during the Superbowl that it would webcast its fashion show. 1.5 million people attempted to view the Victoria's Secrets webcast, overwhelming the server infrastructure, resulting in a poor experience. [Adler] [Borland] Online services had a problem moving content from source, across the backbones, to eyeballs. 

In 1995, Tim Berners Lee foresaw that this means of delivering content could not successfully scale. He challenged colleagues at MIT to invent a way to deliver web traffic and mitigate congestion, particularly during moments of peak or flash demand. [Akamai History] [Mitra (quoting Tom Leighton, "Tim was interested in issues with the Internet and the web, and he foresaw there would be problems with congestion. Hot spots, flash crowds, … and that the centralized model of distributing content would be facing challenges. He was right.... He presented an ideal problem for me and my group to work on.")][Berners-Lee] [Held 149] (For discussion of flash demand, see [Jung] [Khan]) A 1998 entrepreneurship competition at MIT resulted in Patent '703 which became Akamai [Akamai History] [Khan]. CDNs were designed to fetch and cache the most popular content, store it closer to access networks, and permit quality access to the content while avoiding transit fees.  

Larry Roberts, "The ARPANET and Computer Networks" - Computer History Museum

1968 : June 26 :: FCC Releases Carterfone Decision ~ Approves Foreign Attachments to Network

Source: Wikipedia

In 1959, Carter invented a device, which he named for himself, that permitted users of mobile radio systems to interconnect their landline telephone with the radio system to permit mobile and fixed users to communicate with each other.   Consider, for example, the ability to use a Carterfone to link a marine radio to the telephone line, allowing someone on a boat to talk to someone on a telephone.

AT&T advised its customers that the Carterfone, if used in conjunction with an AT&T telephone, would subject the end user to penalties pursuant to AT&T's FCC tariff number 132, which provided that:

No equipment, apparatus, circuit or device not furnished by the telephone company shall be attached to or connected with the facilities furnished by the telephone company, whether physically, by induction or otherwise ....

Carter filed a private antitrust suit against AT&T, and the District Court referred the matter in 1966 to the FCC.

Before the FCC, AT&T again failed to demonstrate how competitive CPE would harm the network. The Commission concluded that AT&T's tariff was unreasonable and discriminatory and ordered the restrictive tariff provisions stricken. The Commission was troubled by the tariff provision that would have permitted end users to install AT&T-manufactured equipment with exactly the same functionality offered by the Carterfone, but not the Carterfone itself. The Commission determined that a customer desiring to improve the functionality of the telephone network by interconnecting a piece of equipment not manufactured by the phone company should be permitted to do so, so long as that equipment does not harm the network. As stated by Huber, Kellogg, and Thorne, "Unvarnished claims of threatened harm to the network would no longer suffice;" from here out, AT&T would have to demonstrate specific harm to prohibit competitive CPE. The Commission also rejected AT&T's arguments that opening the network to competitive CPE would have adverse economic impact on AT&T's telephone service.

Opening the telephone network to interconnection with foreign attachments or customer premise equipment opened the telephone network to interconnection with modems, fax machines, answering machines and was one of the necessary preconditions that paved the way for the Internet.  In a parallel proceeding in this time, the FCC had initiated the Computer Inquiries.

Use of the Carterfone Device in Message Toll Telephone Service; Thomas F. Carter and Carter Electronics Corp., Dallas, Tex. (Complainants), v. American Telephone and Telegraph Co., Associated Bell System Companies, Southwestern Bell Telephone Co., and General Telephone Co. of the Southwest (Defendants), Docket Nos. 16942, 17073, Decision, 13 FCC 2d 420 (1968) (Carterfone), recon. denied, 14 FCC 2d 571 (1968).

Derived From: From Jason Oxman, FCC Working Paper 31:  The FCC and the Unregulation of the Internet Text | Word97 | Adobe | Press Release | July 1999

Video :: A tour of AT&T's Network Operations Center (1979)