Data Communications at the National Physical Laboratory (1965-1975)

Campbell-Kelly, Martin

doi:10.1109/mahc.1987.10023

Cited by 42 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…In line with this narrative pattern, the key role of users, probably the most 'anonymous heroes' of the Internet revolution, has also been narrated through the lens of US actors. 5 In broader terms, there are only three exceptions to US stories within this dominant narrative that are still in wide circulation: the first one deals with the link between the US pioneer Paul Baran and the UK scientist Donald Davies, who simultaneously envisioned the packet switching method in the early 1960s (Campbell-Kelly 1987); secondly, the literature recognizes the influence of the French networking project Cyclades, led by the influential figure of Louis Pouzin, who inspired Vint Cerf and the creation of TCP/IP protocols; finally, the third and most known exception is the invention, by the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, of the World Wide Web, which took place in Geneva in 1990 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). 6 For the rest, it seems that the Internet was born, inspired, developed and spread mainly thanks to the work, the ideas and the cooperation among US actors.…”

Section: The Dominant Narrative Of Internet Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Internet Myth: From the Internet Imaginary to Network Ideologies

Bory

2020

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Biography of the Web as a Myth-Building Narrative 2.2 Questioning the Myth of the Web: Media Imaginaries and Web History 2.2.1 Hypertext: The Forgotten Hero Ted Nelson 2.2.2 Retracing Old Media in the World Wide Web 2.2.3 The Web and the Network 2.3 Rethinking Web History 3. Lost Networks: The Socrate and Iperbole Projects in Italy 3.1 The Web Was Not Alone 3.2 The Italian Networking Landscape in the 1990s 3.3 Rise and Fall of Socrate 3.3.1 The Uncertain Reasons for the Failure viii Contents 3.4 The Other Network: The Internet in Italy 3.4.1 Iperbole: The Pioneering Italian Civic Network Project 3.5 Conflicting Imaginaries: Socrate vs. Iperbole 3.6 The Ruins of Socrate 3.7 Legacy Systems 4. Challenging the Network Ideologies 4.1 Imaginary Networks 4.2 The Transitory Propriety of Network Imaginaries 4.3 The Power of Limits 4.4 Beyond Networks References List of Acronyms Index Preface xiii Internet. The 1990s was the decade when, to quote Umberto Eco, this integrated vision of the network emerged, while more recently a turn towards the apocalyptic vision occurred with key authors such as Morozov, Lyon, Zuboff, Fuchs and others. But, in the contemporary 'network imaginaries' , the two visions still co-exist. The one studied in this book is already in place and has limited the possibilities to imagine other forms of network. This is a relevant aspect, underlined by Paolo Bory in the final pages: the power of limits. Consequently, this book is also an inquiry in the limits of imagining the Internet and the technologies we live by in general. Internet imaginaries, ideologies, narratives, and myths (all terms used and explained by Paolo in his book) take time to be built, spread, accepted, and maybe then killed by society. They all have effects in the long term, they need long periods to be metabolized, and their effects are persistent even if often unnoticed. This book uses history, one of the few disciplines able to grasp longterm changes and continuities, in order to understand crucial issues in the relationships between contemporary societies and the Internet. It is an attempt to retrace how the digital culture today is based on forgotten ideas, to revitalize the powerful and persistent narratives behind failed projects, and to understand how the Internet was built with a mix of mythologies, human needs and limits. Every technology of communication is a by-product of the society that created it. And in every society, imaginaries, ideologies, narratives, and myths play a crucial role in establishing a taken-for-granted and yet powerful system of looking at the world. This book ultimately aims to study the habitus where the Internet was created and, in the end, to better understand the ways in which contemporary societies decide to imagine, show, and limit themselves.

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Section: The Dominant Narrative Of Internet Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Internet Myth: From the Internet Imaginary to Network Ideologies

Bory

2020

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“…Significantly, the intensity of technical development and innovation in telephone line switching in the early twentieth century (Fagen 1975) was, in part, due to the fact that the number of possible (indexical) one-to-one connections increases approximately as the square of the total number of subscribers in a network (Mueller 1989); by contrast, the store-and-forward telegrams of Western Union's network could be given various levels of priority and delivery time in high-traffic situations without immediately necessitating extra lines. This advantageous quality of message switching would find a recurrence in the 1960s development of packet switching, inspired in part by existing message switching architectures such as those of Western Union's (Campbell-Kelly 1988;Abbate 2000); in the next section, I will propose a general typology of messaging features which places the distinctive technical qualities highlighted by the advent of the ticker-(1) the asynchrony of data arrival, (2) the synchrony of transmission, (3) its broadcast to large numbers of recipients, and (4) its unpredictable flow-in relation to later developments in data communications.…”

Section: The Ticker In Relation To the Telegraphmentioning

confidence: 99%

Middleware’s Message: the Financial Technics of Codata

Castelle

2019

Philos. Technol.

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In this paper, I will argue for the relevance of certain distinctive features of messaging systems, namely those in which data (a) can be sent and received asynchronously, (b) can be sent to multiple simultaneous recipients and (c) is received as a "potentially infinite" flow of unpredictable events. I will describe the social technology of the stock ticker, a telegraphic device introduced at the New York Stock Exchange in the 1860s, with reference to early twentieth century philosophers of synchronous experience (Bergson), simultaneous sign interpretations (Mead and Peirce), and flows of discrete events (Bachelard). Then, I will show how the ticker's data flows developed into the 1990s-era technologies of message queues and message brokers, which distinguished themselves through their asynchronous implementation of ticker-like message feeds sent between otherwise incompatible computers and terminals. These latter systems' characteristic "publish/subscribe" communication pattern was one in which conceptually centralized (if logically distributed) flows of messages would be "published," and for which "subscribers" would be spontaneously notified when events of interest occurred. This paradigm-common to the so-called "message-oriented middleware" systems of the late 1990s-would re-emerge in different asynchronous distributed system contexts over the following decades, from "push media" to Twitter to the Internet of Things.

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“…Paul Baran, working on a military communication project for the Air Force, reported in 1964 that a switched network was the most reliable way to set up a survivable emergency communication network. Finally, Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom made a proposal for a "national message switching network" (225-6) for commercial applications; it was not until the next year that it was brought to Davies's attention that Baran had made a similar proposal [15]. Although some have suggested that packet-switching was developed independently by two or three different researchers, it would be more accurate to state that the research was conducted collaboratively.…”

Section: The Military Origin Mythmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competing Histories of Technology: Recognizing the Vital Role of International Scientific Communities behind the Innovation of the Internet

Leslie

2013

Making the History of Computing Relevant

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One way to make the history of computing relevant is to explain how different histories are in competition with each other and how they support quite different technology policy. The prevalent history that the US military created the Internet hides the international spirit of goodwill and cooperation that made a particular implementation of Internet happen. This is not just an academic issue. The success of the Internet encourages us to ask how we can continue to innovate the technologies of the Internet or new technologies of a similar power. The myth that the military created the Internet also supports the idea that it was designed on purpose according to a plan. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, the most interesting thing about the Internet is that, in its history, it had a tendency to violate the plans set forth. The international community invigorated the kind of inquiry that would lead to the Internet, not the United States in isolation. In order to create something like the Internet, then, we need to provide an environment for international exchange and cooperation, not maintain proprietary secrets and work in a disciplined environment of practical research.

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Data Communications at the National Physical Laboratory (1965-1975)

Cited by 42 publications

References 21 publications

The Internet Myth: From the Internet Imaginary to Network Ideologies

The Internet Myth: From the Internet Imaginary to Network Ideologies

Middleware’s Message: the Financial Technics of Codata

Competing Histories of Technology: Recognizing the Vital Role of International Scientific Communities behind the Innovation of the Internet

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