Social History of New Media week2: ARPANET, Alternative Networks, Counter Culture

Social History of
New Media week2
ARPANET, “Alternative” Networks, Counter Culture,
the Internet, and “Virtual Community”

Trebor Scholz

Histories of the Internet

week 2

Required Readings:
Abbate, Janet. “’The most neglected element:’ users transform arpanet.” Inventing the Internet. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT P, 1999.

Hafner, Katie. “Email.” Where wizards stay up late the origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1996.

Trebor Scholz

Histories of the Internet

questions

What are a few commonly held assumptions about the history of the Internet?

Which similarities and differences between the emergence of the Internet and earlier media
like telegraph, radio, and television can you observe?

Trebor Scholz

The Victorian Internet
by Tom Standage (1989)

1746

200
monks
Jean-‐Antoine
Nollet
linked

to
electrical
battery

1797
optical
telegraphy

telephone,
radio,
...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Braun_HF_1.jpg

"knowledge on call"

hyperlinked pages and the “memex”

http://tinyurl.com/39mf8l

http://tinyurl.com/3b7h9v

In
1949
in
his
novel
Heliopolis,
the
German
Ernst
Junger
dreams

up
the
communication
medium
"Phonophor,"
which
connects

everybody
to
everybody
else,
enabling
a
permanent
,
technically

facilitated
forum
that
also
replaces
the
passport,
watch,

newspaper,
library,
and
encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger
http://tinyurl.com/2s2zn5

[A]ctivation;
authorship;
community
-‐-‐
are
the
most
frequently

cited
motivations
for
almost
all
artistic
attempts
to
encourage

participation
in
art
since
the
1960s."
according
to
art
historian

Claire
Bishop.

Blog:
http://blog.sfmoma.org/tag/art-‐of-‐participation/
Flickr
set:
http://www.lickr.com/photos/ari/sets/72157610572023159/

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Girl_listenin

Excerpts
from
chapter
2,
and
5

“Sputnik:
Declassiied”
(2007)

http://www.netlix.com/Movie/Sputnik_Declassiied/70086393

http://www.lickr.com/photos/nezitic/311892760/sizes/o/
Red
Flag
Over
Reichstag
9th
May
1945

The Advanced Research Projects Agency

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2QdEj8UjBc

Leonard Kleinrock, MIT
"Information Flow in Large
Communication Nets"
(May 31 1961)

First paper on packet-switching

http://tinyurl.com/23nbat

Packet Switching, Paul Baran 1962 at RAND, US Airforce

All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all
other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate,
pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would
be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed.
Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and
end at some other specified destination node.

http://tinyurl.com/2ry3lo

“On Distributed Communication Networks,” March 1964
c) a network without central authority or single
Paul Baran
outage point

http://tinyurl.com/ywq8nk

Ted
Nelson
coins
the
term
"Hypertext"
in
"A
File
Structure
for
the
Complex,
the
Changing,
and
the
Indeterminate".
20th
National
Conference,
New
York,
Association
for
Computing
Machinery

1965

Already in 1965, Fernando Corbato and his colleagues at
MIT developed a program to allow individual users to
swap messages on one single computer.

Excerpts
from:
American
Experience
|
Summer
of
Love
|
PBS
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/love/

People’s
Park
-‐-‐
Excerpt
from
“Berkeley
in
the
Sixties”
http://akas.imdb.de/media/rm1389337600/tt0099121

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQbEjPzfDmc&feature=PlayList&p=C97DC8509C17275A&index=2

Macy
conferences
1946-‐53,
NYC
video:
10
mins

Excerpts
from:
The
Commune
(2005)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439511/

"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine
than face to face...We believe that we are entering into a technological age, in which we
will be able to interact with the richness of living information -- not merely in the passive
way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as active
participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through our interaction with
it, and not simply receiving something from it by our connection to it. (53)"

http://tinyurl.com/2c9uaf

Louis Pouzin designed and directed the development of
the Cyclades network in France, which then stopped in
1974.
http://tinyurl.com/22ykun

In 1968, ARPA sent out a Request for
Quotation to build a network of
four Interface Message Processors.
BBN made it.
Dave Walden, Bernie Cosell, Severo Ornstein, Will Crowther, Bob Kahn

1969: Advanced Research Projects Agency
commissions ARPANET to conduct research
on networking.

First ARPANET nodes connected UCLA,
Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and
University of Utah

http://tinyurl.com/yuw6ho
http://tinyurl.com/2pxazn
http://tinyurl.com/2ujdes

Norm Abramson wanted to surf - so he moved to Hawaii in
1969. He wanted to network with the other islands and so he
built the ALOHAnet in 1970.

From the University of Hawaii, Abramson connected
computers over a network of radio transmitters using a
protocol telling the computers how to share the airwaves.

http://tinyurl.com/yvvmdc

Trebor Scholz

The
Internet
in
1969
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0pPfyYtiBc&e

http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php

TCP/IP

With TCP/IP, the "global network" was
becoming a reality. Universities and
government offices were using the
network for communicating with
colleagues and exchanging data.

1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet
Network Interconnection", which specified in detail the design
of a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
http://tinyurl.com/3c64vm
http://tinyurl.com/yvvmdc

Whose Standards? Proprietary or Open Standards?

Also the fax machine is only useful if many other people have it.
Later: If the Internet would have just connected supercomputers,
it would have not been as significant.

Trebor Scholz http://tinyurl.com/yu7g2m

http://tinyurl.com/29vvar
PowWow

Throughout the 1970s Instant Messaging began to appear

•There was no single inventor of the Internet.

•ARPANET, Usenet, BITNET, and BBS

•DARPA was not solely a response to the fear
of a nuclear armageddon.

http://tinyurl.com/34gyk2

1971: Ray Tomlinson of BBN creates email program to send
messages across a distributed network.

1972: Tomlinson expands program to ARPANET users, using
the "@" sign as part of the address.

Michael Hart

1971. Project Gutenberg is the first and largest
single collection of free electronic books, or
eBooks.

Project Gutenberg is the
"oldest digital library built on volunteer
efforts to digitize, archive, and distribute
cultural works."

http://tinyurl.com/26zq8z

Trebor Scholz

http://tinyurl.com/35drka

http://tinyurl.com/2n5gvy

1977 Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw created the first MUD
(Multi-User Dungeon) leading later to MMORPG

CBBS (first BBS) January of 1978, Chicago was hit by
Ward Christensen the Great Blizzard of 1978

Many people did not have the Internet. They dialed in to CBSS directly via modem.
Users had to take turns accessing the system, each hanging up when done to let
someone else have access. Nevertheless, the system was seen as very useful, and ran for
many years and inspired the creation of many other bulletin board systems.

http://tinyurl.com/38zf8q
http://tinyurl.com/3a8wru

ASCii art on BBS

http://tinyurl.com/yukqdk

Emoticons

1979 Kevin MacKenzie e-mailed his
fellow subscribers at MsgGroup, an
early Internet bulletin board, with a

suggestion to put some emotion back
into the dry text medium of e-mail.
(The eyes came later.)

USENET established. USENET was a global, decentralized,
distributed Internet discussion system that provided mail
services and file transfers. Precursor of GoogleGroups and
other discussion boards.
http://tinyurl.com/2mdk3z

ARPANET
http://echo.gmu.edu/usenet/images/usenet.gif

http://www.sri.com/about/timeline/images/map.gi

Trebor Scholz

What else did it take to make this WWW work?

http://tinyurl.com/2km2n9

This was the ﬁrst IBM PC introduced on Aug 12, 1981

Douglas Engelbart

http://tinyurl.com/3c7suu

The Well members could start discussion boards:
Mid-80s
the most popular one was dedicated to
computer manufacturers push proprietary protocols,
The Grateful Dead.
which failed

US Government pushed for ISO but TCP/IP was free, more viral

In the 1980s the PCs entered homes and offices in the United States.

The Well members could start discussion boards:
the most popular one was dedicated to
The Grateful Dead.

1981 BITNET release
Ira Fuchs (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman (Yale)
Main features: email, LISTSERV

BITNET set expectations for free access and openness: it charged by
bandwidth. Once you paid for the line, how much you use it was up
to you. Others tried to establish a pay by byte system.

http://tinyurl.com/2vxbj
http://tinyurl.com/2cl3go

1985
Stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant
one of the first community bulletin board systems
The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (The Well)

Brand used a networked PC on his houseboat in Sasalito, CA, claiming that he did so in
order to experience commune living without actually moving into one.

http://tinyurl.com/374e2g

Francois
Lyotard
and
Thierry
Chaput’s
exhibition

"Les
Immateriaux”
at
the
Centre
Georges
Pompidou
in
Paris.
30
artists
collaboratively
respond
to
50
terms
related
the
topic
of
the
"immaterial."

Lyotard
and
Chaput
pointed
out
that
they
were
mainly
interested
in
the
way,
in
which
this
collaborative
writing
changed
the
experience
of
the
act
of
writing
itself.

http://tinyurl.com/ynkmby

Trebor Scholz

Trebor Scholz
The New School University

scholzt@newschool.edu

This presentation is made public using the creative commons attribution, non-commercial, share alike license.

This presentation is based on my previous courses on the topic including:
http://www.slideshare.net/trebor/how-the-social-web-came-to-be-part1

Social History of New Media week2: ARPANET, Alternative Networks, Counter Culture

Social History of New Media week2: ARPANET, Alternative Networks, Counter Culture

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