di bwah ini penggalan TCP/IP 4Layers.
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Theory Four - Applications layer-led
Perhaps answering this line of confusion as to whether the Internet can be represented by either telephony infrastructure or any particular protocol at the transport layer, Mitra Ardron takes it further with another theory altogether. (Internet History newsletter, October 2004)"I would suggest that defining the history of the internet by the particular protocol that won is only one way to do it. Ask yourself - would it still be the internet if we were using ATM, or X.25 or any of the other competing protocols? Of course it would.
An alternative view of history tracks the history of the Internet as the ubiquitous use of electronic "online" communications. The history belongs at the applications level - with the development of email, with the progression from proprietary databases to Gopher and Wais to the World Wide Web, and from newsgroups and conferencing (eg BITnet and Usenet) through mailing lists and blogs.
One very significant trend which tends to get ignored is the various online systems, the early Source, Compuserve, Dialcom, and of course APC networks, Fidonet etc. If anything, the history of the use of the Internet, at least from the point of view of the public, owes more to that stream of development than the more common version.
From that perspective, the switch from X.25 to TCP/IP around say '92 for the transport was just something that was done when cost/benefit of TCP/IP dropped below that of X.25."
Ardron refers to the existence of an emerging interconnectivity regime between various commercial, non-profit and hobbyist networks which began to emerge from the mid 1980s without necessarily using TCP/IP. During this pre-web era, email began to be exchanged freely between networks according to emerging standards and through various gateways. Newsgroups emanating from academic circles became available on various networks, with only a percentage of the people utilizing the growing global network using TCP/IP.
The "killer app" driving all of these networks was email. Email existed before the Internet, but in those days email could only be used to send messages to various users of the same computer. Once computers began to talk to each other over networks, however, the problem became a little more complex - We needed to be able to put a message in an envelope and address it. To do this, we needed a means to indicate to whom letters should go that the electronic posties understood - just like the postal system, we needed a way to indicate an address.
This is why Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1972. Like many of the Internet pioneers, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an Arpanet contractor. He picked the @ symbol from the computer keyboard to denote sending messages from one computer to another. So then, for anyone using Internet standards, it was simply a matter of nominating [EMAIL PROTECTED] Internet pioneer Jon Postel was one of the first users of the new system, and is credited with describing it as a "nice hack". It certainly was, and it has lasted to this day.
Email drove mass adoption in the pre world wide web era known as the "protocol wars". Governments continued to argue for some time for a completely different set of standards based on OSI; Hobbyist networks maintained the Fidonet system; various efforts such as APC and UFGate software bridged the Unix and PC based network worlds - and a host of commercial systems such as Dialcom, Compuserve, AOL and other email systems with entirely different operating systems were all seeking an answer to the connectivity crisis. But email exchanges across these systems were already working by a variety of means.
Later on, TCP/IP won the protocol wars on costs and simplicity of adoption. Soon after, the World Wide Web appeared, and the last of the laggards believing they had a separate future began to convert.
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