The first to be crowned with success were the United States Air Force researchers.
They utilized the dense private radio station network in the United States
and partly the frequency that was not used by them (both radio and television
stations do not make use of a large part of the frequency bands allotted to
them, through which, nowadays, teletext or RDS signals are transmitted). This
way, without the radio stations knowing anything about the whole thing, they
built up a tape machine network responsible for transmitting, in their frequency,
Air Force signals.
That must have been the first Internet network in the world. The next step
was the creation of the ARPANET (that was the predecessor of the Internet),
which also utilized an already existing dense private network, the one used
by the telephone companies. This network, in spite of the AT&T big shots’ resentment,
was developed and linked at first nine universities with some of their researchers
using it to exchange their views on…science fiction. To the military
establishment’s horror, the message exchange coverage expanded and as
time went by, the Pentagon had to set up their own network called DARPANET,
leaving thus ARPANET in the hands of the academic community who, in their turn
distributed the ARPANET to the rest of the world, and what was initially meant
to be an armed forces network was turned into a scientific one and later on
into a network belonging to all of us…
The way history is made is really amazing. Small details pile up like the
flying course of a butterfly in China that would start up a storm in New York.
no one can question the fact that even the plan of the building where the Internet
was designed, played an important role in the story. The mentality lying behind
the random routes leading in fortuitous encounters amongst least acquainted
people had one and only goal: the production of specialized research. This
is how the Internet operates nowadays. Every message sent, every image or sound
transmitted through the Net is disassembled to packets switched to random routes
in myriads of cords to end up being assembled by the receiver.
A second element worth of attention is the fact that the informatics technology
as a whole has been the outcome of war, be it either a real or a fictitious
one. The first electronic computer, called ENIAC, was built at the end of World
War II to facilitate anti-aircraft batteries aiming at bombers. The predecessor
of the biggest network of all times was set up to confront a cold war nuclear
threat. Maybe the great film director Orson Welles was right in writing: “In
Borgias’ Italy, for thirty years there was war, terror, bloodshed. Yet,
those long years produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland brotherly love reigned, not to mention the 500 years of democracy
and peace, but what was the heritage left? The cuckoo clock.” Need has
always been a schemer.
By Pashos Mandravelis.
email to P. Mandravelis