CHAPTER 2

Introduction

When the first computers were built during the second world war, they were expensive and isolated. However,
after about twenty years, as their prices gradually decreased, the first experiments began to connect computers
together. In the early 1960s, researchers including Paul Baran, Donald Davies or Joseph Licklider independently
published the first papers describing the idea of building computer networks [Baran] [Licklider1963] . Given
the cost of computers, sharing them over a long distance was an interesting idea. In the US, the ARPANET
started in 1969 and continued until the mid 1980s [LCCD09]. In France, Louis Pouzin developed the Cyclades
network [Pouzin1975]. Many other research networks were built during the 1970s [Moore]. At the same time,
the telecommunication and computer industries became interested in computer networks. The telecommunication
industry bet on the X25. The computer industry took a completely different approach by designing Local Area
Networks (LAN). Many LAN technologies such as Ethernet or Token Ring were designed at that time. During
the 1980s, the need to interconnect more and more computers led most computer vendors to develop their own
suite of networking protocols. Xerox developed [XNS] , DEC chose DECNet [Malamud1991] , IBM developed
SNA [McFadyen1976] , Microsoft introduced NetBIOS [Winston2003] , Apple bet on Appletalk [SAO1990] . In
the research community, ARPANET was decommissioned and replaced by TCP/IP [LCCD09] and the reference
implementation was developed inside BSD Unix [McKusick1999]. Universities who were already running Unix
could thus adopt TCP/IP easily and vendors of Unix workstations such as Sun or Silicon Graphics included TCP/IP
in their variant of Unix. In parallel, the ISO, with support from the governments, worked on developing an open
1
Suite of networking protocols. In the end, TCP/IP became the de facto standard that is not only used within the
research community. During the 1990s and the early 2000s, the growth of the usage of TCP/IP continued, and
today proprietary protocols are seldom used. As shown by the figure below, that provides the estimation of the
number of hosts attached to the Internet, the Internet has sustained large growth throughout the last 20+ years.

Figure 2.1: Estimation of the number of hosts on the Internet

1 Open in ISO terms was in contrast with the proprietary protocol suites whose specification was not always publicly available. The US
government even mandated the usage of the OSI protocols (see RFC 1169), but this was not sufficient to encourage all users to switch to the
OSI protocol suite that was considered by many as too complex compared to other protocol suites.

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