; The WELL was abandoned by Stewart Brand
and Larry Brilliant, and the so called 'new media' festivals and
conferences which had sought, encouraged and represented the engagement
of artists, writers and theorists in new technologies and the politics
of the Net, became redundant. Evangelical Net communities living in
disparate and often marginalised parts of the globe, who had come
together through listservs and euphoric fantasies for the potential of
an Internet based global change for the better, for empowerment and
border free communication for the politically disenfranchised and the
war torn, became disillusioned.
Pretty soon Vint Cerf closed down the Internet Society, and the US
National Science Foundation closed the Internet to commercial use.
Months later the text based virtual space 'Lambdamoo' finally went
offline and The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a
U.S. Department of Defense funded project which had pioneered the early
Internet, resumed its operations.
At CERN in Geneva Tim Berners Lee disabled communications between all
HTTP clients and servers via the Internet and dismantled the World Wide Web.
At around the same time Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris and Craig Partridge
redesigned the Domain Name System (DNS), removing all domain names
ending in .edu .gov .com .mil .org .net and .int.
The DCA combined MILNET with ARPANET where at the time there were 68
nodes on ARPANET, and 45 on MILNET, the military network and Vint Cerf
replaced Barry Leiner at DARPA managing the Internet.
Leonard Kleinrock held the key mathematical background to packet
switching and an ARPANET network was re-established between KleinrockÕs
lab at UCLA and Douglas EngelbartÕs lab at SRI and the initial 4-node
network was reconnected with UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.
Vinton G. Cerf went on to work in Kleinrock's data packet networking
group at UCLA that connected the first 2 nodes of ARPANET, then went
back to work at IBM before returning to Stanford.
Robert Elliot Kahn, who had invented Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
and Internet Protocol (IP) with Vint Cerf and written, 'Host to IMP
Spec. 1822' at BBN which detailed the interface between ARPANET host
computers and the Interface Message Processors, returned via MIT to his
position at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, ATT.
Lawrence Roberts, the first Information Processing Technologies Office
(IPTO) chief scientist, began design of ARPANET, upon becoming Director
of IPTO.
Robert W. Taylor who had conceived of and directed funding for ARPANET
and who with J. C. R. Licklider had written, 'The Computer as a
Communication Device', the paper which led to the creation of ARPANET,
returned from his new role as Director of IPTO at ARPA to work for NASA.
Taylor decided to leave ARPA after congress pushed for it to focus its
work towards advancing military missions during the Vietnam War, because
his mission was for the technology to be available to all.
Ivan Sutherland took over as head of IPTO at ARPA and was shortly
replaced by J. C. R. Licklider. Licklider, known for his work in
Artificial Intelligence and cybernetics, dissuaded Sutherland, Taylor
and Roberts from developing the Internet.
Suzanne Treister 2013
Published in: 'Networks', Edited by Lars Bang Larsen, Whitechapel
Documents of Contemporary Art, published by MIT Press 2014
Suzanne Treister
http://www.suzannetreister.net/
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