(This is an original writing by Bruce Sterling. I abbreviated it somewhat to make the "Short History" and little shorter. The original can be found by using the address for Bruce bruces@well.sf.ca.us)
  
 

     Some thirty  years ago, the RAND Corporation,  America's foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem.  How could the US authorities successfully communicate  after a nuclear war    The principles were simple.  The network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times.  It would be designed from the-get-go to transcend its own unreliability.  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.  Each packet would wind its way through the network on an individual basis.
     In fall 1969, the  first such node was installed in UCLA.  By December 1969, there were four nodes on the infant network, which was named ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor.  The four computers could  transfer data  on dedicated high-speed transmission lines.   They could even be programmed remotely from the other nodes.  Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers could share one another's computer facilities by long-distance.  This was a very handy service, for computer-time was precious in the early '70s.  In 1971 there were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by 1972, thirty-seven nodes.  And it was good.
      As early as 1977, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol /Internet Protocol) 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, since each node was independent, and had to handle its own financing and its own technical requirements.   The more, the merrier.  Like the phone network, the computer network became steadily more valuable as it embraced larger and larger territories of people and resources.
     In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act, through its Office of Advanced Scientific Computing.   The new NSFNET set a blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster, shinier supercomputers, through thicker, faster links, upgraded and expanded, again and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990.  And other government agencies leapt in:  NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, each of them maintaining the Internet confederation.
     The Internet is especially popular among scientists, and is probably the most important scientific instrument of the late twentieth century.   The  powerful, sophisticated access that it provides to specialized data and personal communication has sped up the pace of scientific research enormously.     The Internet's pace of growth in the early 1990s is  spectacular, almost ferocious.  It is spreading faster than cellular phones, faster than fax machines.  Last year the Internet was growing at a rate of twenty percent a *month.*  The number of "host" machines with direct connection to TCP/IP has been doubling every year since1988.   The Internet is moving out of  its original base in military and research institutions,  into elementary and high schools, as well as into public libraries and the commercial sector.
     Why do people want to be "on the Internet?"  One of the main reasons is  simple freedom.   The Internet is a rare example of a true, modern, functional  anarchy.   There is no "Internet Inc."   There are no official censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders. In principle, any node can speak as a peer to any other node, as long as it obeys the rules of the TCP/IP protocols, which are strictly technical, not social or political.  (There has been some struggle over commercial use of the Internet, but that situation is changing as businesses supply their own links).
     Still, its various interest groups all have a claim.   Business people want the Internet put on a sounder financial footing. Government people want the Internet more fully regulated. Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research. Military people want it spy-proof and secure.
 
    But what does one "do" with the Internet?  Four things, basically:  mail, discussion groups, long-distance computing, and file transfers.
    Internet mail is "e-mail," electronic mail, faster by several orders of magnitude than the US Mail, which is scornfully known by Internet regulars as "snail mail."  Internet mail is somewhat like fax. It's electronic text.   But you don't have to pay for it  (at least not directly),  and it's global in scope.   E-mail can also send software and certain forms of compressed digital imagery.  New forms of mail are in the works.
     The discussion groups, or "newsgroups," are a world of their own.  This world of news, debate and argument is generally known as "USENET. "  USENET is, in point of fact, quite different from the Internet.   USENET is rather like an enormous billowing crowd of gossipy, news-hungry people, wandering in and through  the Internet on their way to various private backyard barbecues. USENET is not so much a physical network as a set of social conventions.    In any case, at the moment there are some 2,500separate news groups on USENET, and their discussions generate about7 million words of typed commentary every single day.   Naturally there is a vast amount of talk about computers on USENET, but the variety of subjects discussed is enormous, and it's growing larger all the time.   USENET also distributes various free electronic journals and publications.     Both net news and e-mail are very widely available, even outside the high-speed core of the Internet itself.
     Long-distance computing was an original inspiration for ARPANET and is still a very useful service, at least for some. Programmers can maintain accounts on distant, powerful computers, run programs there or write their own.  Scientists can make  use of powerful supercomputers a continent away.  Libraries offer their electronic card catalogs for free search.   Enormous CD-ROM catalogs are increasingly available through this service.  And there are fantastic amounts of free software available.
     File transfers allow Internet users to access remote machines and retrieve programs or text.    Many Internet computers – some two thousand of them, so far -- allow any person to access them anonymously, and to simply copy  their public files, free of charge. This is no small deal, since entire books can be transferred through direct Internet access in a matter of minutes.  Today, in 1992, there are over a million such public files available to anyone who asks for them (and many more millions of files are available to people with accounts).   Internet file-transfers  are becoming a new form of publishing, in which the reader simply electronically copies the work on demand, in any quantity he or she wants, for free.   New Internet programs, such as "archie," "gopher," and "WAIS," have been developed to catalog  and explore these enormous archives of material.
 The future of the Internet bids fair to be bigger and exponentially faster.  Commercialization of the Internet is a very hot topic today, with every manner of wild new commercial information-service promised.  The federal government, pleased with an unsought success, is also still  very much in the act.  NREN, the National Research and Education Network, was approved by the US Congress in fall1991, as a five-year, $2 billion project to upgrade the Internet "backbone."  NREN will be some fifty times faster than the fastest network available today, allowing the electronic transfer of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one hot second.    Computer networks worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high-definition television.   A multimedia global circus!     Or so it's hoped  -- and planned.   The real Internet of the future may bear very little resemblance to today's plans. After all, today's Internet bears little resemblance to those original grim plans for RAND's post-holocaust command grid.   It's a fine and happy irony.
     How does one get access to the Internet?   Well -- if you don't have a computer and a modem, get one.   Your computer can act as a terminal, and you can use an ordinary telephone line to connect to an Internet-linked machine.  These slower and simpler adjuncts to the Internet can provide you with the net news discussion groups and your own e-mail address.  These are services worth having – though if you only have mail and news, you're not actually "on the Internet" proper.
 If you're on a campus, your university may have direct" dedicated access" to high-speed Internet TCP/IP lines.  Apply for an Internet account on a dedicated campus machine, and you may be able to get those hot-dog long-distance computing and file-transfer functions. Some cities, such as Cleveland, supply "freenet" community access.  Businesses increasingly have Internet access, and are willing to sell it to subscribers.  The standard fee is about $40a month -- about the same as TV cable service.
     As the Nineties proceed, finding a link to the Internet will become much cheaper and easier.  Its ease of use will also improve, which is fine news, for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves plenty of room for advancements in user-friendliness.  Learning the Internet now, or at least learning about it, is wise.  By the turn of the century, "network literacy,"  like "computer literacy" before it,  will be forcing itself into the  very texture of your life.
---VirusEd101 note: As can be seen, many things have changed with the internet, including some information by the author of this piece. Prices have fallen, more people are online and as the 21st century proceeds, the history continues.