The Internet: On its International Origins and Collaborative Vision

A Work In-Progress

By Ronda Hauben

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“[T]he effort at developing the Internet Protocols was international

from the beginning.”

Vinton Cerf, "How the Internet Came to Be"

ABSTRACT

The process of the Internet's development offers an important

prototype to understand the creation of a multinational

collaborative research project which depends on and fosters

communication across the boundaries of diverse administrative

structures, political entities, and technical designs.

The mythology surrounding the origins of the Internet is that it

began in 1969 in the US That is the date marking the origins

of the ARPANET (a US packet switching network), but not the

birth of the Internet. The origins of the Internet date from 1973.

The goal of the researchers creating the Internet was to create a

network of networks, a means for networks from diverse countries

to intercommunicate. Originally the design was to link up several

national but diverse packet switching networks including the ARPANET

US),Cyclades (France),and NPL (Great Britain). When that was not

politically feasible, the research project involved Norwegian,

British and American research groups, and researchers from other

countries, especially France, at various junctures. These research

groups did the early development work. The Internet was

international from its very beginnings.

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