August 9, 2004
(Computerworld)
Thirty-five years. It seems like about a century, doesn't it? But it was 35 years ago this month that the Arpanet -- the initial piece of today's Internet -- began to go live. Sure, that's a fuzzy way of saying it. But it took a while. On Aug. 30, 1969, the first Arpanet node was set up at the University of California, Los Angeles. The second node wasn't ready at the Stanford Research Institute until Oct. 1. And the first attempt to log on across the Arpanet didn't happen until Oct. 29. (For the record, it crashed the network.)
Go ahead -- party from now until Halloween. The Net is worth it.
1969 was a great year for technology. Ken Thompson at AT&T's Bell Labs wrote the first version of Unix that year. Ted Codd defined the relational database. Three IBM researchers -- Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie -- lent their initials to GML, the ancestor of today's HTML and XML. And Xerox's Gary Starkweather combined photocopier technology with laser imaging to create the first laser printer.
They all changed the face of IT -- and the way IT is used in business. But none has had as dramatic an impact as the Arpanet.
The rest changed how we do what we do. The Net changed the paradigm.
Wait, stop, don't leave! That's not just the usual buzzspeak. The Arpanet's impact really is qualitatively different from those of the other technologies.
Unix, relational databases, markup languages and laser printers proved their value by replacing existing operating systems, databases, text-coding schemes and printers. They let us do the same things as before, only better.
But the Arpanet -- and the Internet -- changed the way we think.
With the Net, IT went from being about number crunching and data processing to being about communications -- between machines and between people.
After 35 years, the network isn't just the computer, as Sun Microsystems used to say. With Web services, the network is the application. With network-attached storage, it's the disk drive. With voice over IP, it's the telephone.
Add the Web, and the network is the radio and the TV. It's the conference room and the office. It's the retail store and the research library.
It's not just how we do IT. Increasingly, it's how the world does business.
The dark side? Sure, it's there. With the Net, physical collocation is no longer required, and physical security is no longer enough. And offshoring of information jobs becomes possible. And criminals halfway around the world attacking our systems became inevitable. And on the Web, every design flaw in our systems is exposed to customers, with no sales clerks or customer service agents to cover for us.
But the Net also lets our companies do business with customers they would never have approached before. It opens up new ways of cutting costs and adding value. It has dragged IT out of the back office and the glass house and made it indispensable to every step in the business process -- from supply chains, logistics and manufacturing to sales, cross-marketing and customer care.
After 35 years, the Net really has brought us a long way. But not quite far enough.
After all, we still don't quite get it. Sure, we buy things on eBay and search with Google. We check our e-mail and load our iPods over the Internet. But we still talk about writing application code instead of wiring together Web services. We think in terms of data centers instead of network-attached everything.
Don't worry -- we'll master it. Old habits of thinking are just tough to break.
But until we do, we'll have to celebrate the Arpanet's birthday the old-fashioned way.
And party like it's 1969.
Frank Hayes, Computerworld's senior news columnist, has covered IT for more than 20 years. Contact him at frank_hayes@computerworld.com.