Thirty years after the publication of the first paper about the Net, its applications are proliferating faster than ever This has been a special year and September a memorable month for MCI senior vice-president Vinton Cerf and many others around the world who closely follow the internet. Outside his day job, Mr Cerf is widely known as one of the founding fathers of the internet. But he stressed that the development of this worldwide network of networks is a continuing challenge, one that is attracting the participation of many more scientists, researchers and experts than ever before. In 1973, Mr Cerf and research colleague Robert Kahn designed the architecture and key communications technologies, TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol), behind the internet. This year marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first paper on the internet - 'A protocol for packet network intercommunication' - co-written by Mr Cerf and Mr Kahn. It was published in the May 1974 issue of Transactions on Communications by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a non-profit group that develops standards for the computer and electronics industries. 'Little did we know 30 years ago that this research effort would spawn countless initiatives by individuals and organisations worldwide to explore the applications made possible by a network of hundreds of millions, soon to be billions, of programmable devices,' Mr Cerf said. He also noted that September 2 was the 35th anniversary of the first installation of the Arpanet in the laboratory of Leonard Kleinrock at the University of California in Los Angeles. Professor Kleinrock was the principal investigator of the Arpanet network measurement centre project. Arpanet was a large wide-area network created by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This system, a precursor to the internet, was established in 1969 as a test bed for networking technologies linking universities and research centres. The Arpanet node, a packet switch that was called at the time an interface message processor, was the first wide-area demonstration of packet switching as a computer communications technology. Soon after that installation, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of Utah became part of Arpanet. Mr Cerf said the installation was also significant because it kick-started more intense research on networking, which led to his collaboration with Mr Kahn on defining the internet's architecture and its associated protocols. 'Comparing the networking world of 1974 to the networks of 2004 is sobering and exhilarating at the same time,' Mr Cerf said. The applications running on the Arpanet included simple e-mail, remote terminal access and file transfers. 'Now we have a tidal wave of so many different applications,' Mr Cerf said, noting programs such as radio frequency identification technology, online films, peer-to-peer and instant messaging, voice-over-IP and various kinds of collaboration and conferencing tools. Some of these new applications, such as VoIP, had served to disrupt the status quo and proven once again the unstoppable march of the internet's influence in people's daily lives, he explained. To further broaden work on the internet and involve more communities around the world, Mr Cerf said he had lent his support to the PlanetLab Consortium, which represented an open, global test bed for developing new internet technologies for an 'overlay network' of computational services. About 150 of the world's top universities and industrial research labs are members of PlanetLab, including national research education networks in China, Brazil and Canada. Mr Cerf said: 'Now if we can just dump all the spam, worm and other malicious programs out of the internet and into another place. Maybe in outer space.'
