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Kaum ein Bereich der modernen Gesellschaft ist heutzutage ohne internetbasierte Technologien denkbar. Die Basis solcher Techniken ist eine immer komplexer werdende und sich ausbreitende Internetinfrastruktur, die permanent aufrechterhalten und den wachsenden Anforderungen entsprechend ausgebaut werden soll. Das wachsende Interesse an internetbasierten Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien hat eine Vielzahl von Studien hervorgebracht, die sich mit der Neugestaltung und Einrichtung von Internettechnologien befassen oder deren Wirkung untersuchen. Die Umgestaltung bestehender informationstechnischer Systeme im Sinne des Umbaus der bestehenden Internetinfrastruktur wurde bislang aber gänzlich ausser Acht gelassen. Dabei ist insbesondere der Umbau der Internetinfrastruktur ausserordentlich komplex. Er bedarf besonderer Beachtung, da dieser im laufenden Betrieb unter Berücksichtigung der Interoperabilität mit bereits bestehenden Technologien in eine stetig wachsende informationstechnische Infrastruktur erfolgen muss. Die vorliegende Arbeit verfolgt daher das Ziel, diese Forschungslücke anhand der Untersuchung der Dynamiken beim Umbau der bestehenden Internetinfrastruktur ein Stück weit zu schliessen und einen Beitrag zur Weiterentwicklung der Infrastrukturforschung zu leisten. Dies geschieht am Beispiel der Analyse des Internetprotokolls; von der Einführung des TCP/IP bis zum in der Einführung befindlichen Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) mit dem Ziel, eine gegenstandsbezogene Theorie zum Umbau der Internetinfrastruktur zu generieren. Dazu wird auf Basis eines systematischen Literaturreviews zum Umbau der Internetinfrastrukturforschung der Einführungsprozess detailliert am Beispiel des Internetprotokolls durch eine Methodentriangulation aus Dokumentenanalyse und Interviews historisch vergleichend rekonstruiert. Dies geschieht in Anlehnung an die Verschränkung der Makroperspektive des Ansatzes grosstechnischer Infrastruktursysteme (GTS) (vgl. etwa Mayntz 1988; Mayntz und Hughes 1988; Braun und Joerges 1994; Hughes 1983; 1987; Joerges 1988; 1996) (engl. Large Scale Infrastructures) mit der Mikroperspektive der Akteur:innen-Netzwerk-Theory (ANT) (vgl. etwa Callon und Latour 2006b [1981]; Callon 2006a [1986]; Latour 1987; Law 2006 [1992]) und basierend auf der Forschungslogik sowie den Methodologien der Grounded Theory (GTM) (vgl. etwa Glaser und Strauss 1967; Strauss und Corbin 1996; 1990). Dabei werden die teilnehmenden Akteur:innen in soziale Akteur:innen, sachliche Elemente und zeitlich-räumliche Konstellationen geclustert sowie deren Wirkung innerhalb des Umbauprozesses der Internetinfrastruktur analysiert. Weiter werden Phasen im Entwicklungs- und Einführungsprozess historisch vergleichend generiert und die verwendeten Strategien zur Entwicklung und Einführung von Infrastrukturtechniken im laufenden System herausgearbeitet. Die Arbeit zeigt hier einen signifikanten Wandel im Bereich der sozialen, sachlichen und zeitlich-räumlichen Akteur:innenkonstellationen auf, welcher nicht ausschliesslich historisch bedingt ist, sondern sich auf die Besonderheiten des Umbaus zunehmend komplexer werdender laufender Infrastruktursysteme zurückführen lässt. Einerseits wird herausgestellt, welche technischen, sozialen und zeitlich-räumlichen Akteur:innenkonstellationen treibend auf den Entwicklungs- und Einführungsprozess wirken und wie die zunehmende Komplexität technischer Strukturen, die Notwendigkeit technischer Interoperabilität und die daraus resultierende zunehmende Standardisierung Einfluss nehmen. Andererseits wird aufgezeigt, wie sich Strategien zur Entwicklung und Einführung zum Beispiel durch sich wandelnde zeitlich-räumliche und organisationale Strukturen verändert haben. Die Studie erarbeitet dabei am Beispiel der Untersuchung der Entwicklung des Internets und Einführung des TCP/IP bis zum IPv6 drei zentrale Entwicklungsphasen für den Umbau der Internetinfrastruktur: Die Innovationsphase, die Stabilisierungsphase und die Migrationsphase. Während in der Innovationsphase die Entwickler:innen zugleich die Nutzer:innen der Technologie waren und das System für den Umbau abgeschaltet wurde, gewährleisten heutzutage in der Migrationsphase vermehrt Internetstandards die Operabilität mit bereits bestehenden Technologien. Weiter werden in der Migrationsphase Testumgebungen zur Erprobung technischer Neuerungen eingerichtet sowie eine schrittweise Implementierung mithilfe von Übergangslösungen verfolgt. Schliesslich stellt die Arbeit heraus, dass Entwicklung und Einpassung reflexiv sind und aufgrund der Komplexität des Internets (soziale und technische Komplexität) zunehmend reglementiert werden. Infolge der Ausweitung des Netzes werden sie ausserdem global verteilt. Weiter lässt sich ein Trend von einer sozialen, sachlichen und zeitlich-räumlichen Homogenität in der Entwicklung und Einführung von Internetinfrastrukturtechnologien beobachten, die sich zu einer in jedem Aspekt wirkenden Heterogenität verschiebt. Diese Veränderungen sind keineswegs isolierter Art. Vielmehr beeinflussen sie ihr Umfeld in einem solchen Mass, dass sie nicht-intendierte Nebenfolgen erzeugen, die die Basis für weitere Entwicklungen bilden.

In this two-part article, I trace the history of the Internet. The Internet started in 1969 as an experiment by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense to use packet switching on leased telephone lines to connect four mainframe computers. Email was invented in 1971 and it became a "killer application" as it promoted easy interaction among its users. By 1972, fifty computers were connected using leased telephone lines to form what was known as the ARPANET which was successfully demonstrated at an international conference — ICCC 72. ARPANET was followed by Packet Radio Network (PRNET), which connected mobile computers, and Satellite Network (SATNET), which connected computers in Europe with those in the US. A protocol named Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was invented in 1973 to interconnect ARPANET, PRNET, and SATNET. The success of the TCP/IP protocol in connecting disparate networks paved the way for the development of the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a biographical profiel of Dave Walden, a key figure in the engineering history of the ARPAnet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how the US government intelligence community (IC) as well as the public and commercial sectors contributed demand-pull, in different ways, for an unregulated, privatized Internet. Demand-pull entails more demand than supply, or a shortage in supply (such as a shortage in networks and thus a demand-pull for them). It is argued that an excessive supply of Cold War era IC spy data, which required high-speed data processing, incentivized ARPANET expansion. In the public sector, people wanted expanded networks for personal computing and in the commercial sector there was demand-pull for unregulated networks that bootlegged and gifted PROMIS derived software could be harnessed to. The IC demand pulled for their own cloned and separate networks, while the public demand pulled for their own networks and commercial interests demand pulled for unregulated, privatized and expanded networks. Together these different demand-pull scenarios incentivized a speedy and unchallenged privatization of an Internet that was neither owned nor regulated by any one government or company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the ARPANET was a United States-funded project that was deeply rooted in US post-war science and technology policies, it had an international dimension from its very early days. The memories of Michel Élie and Gérard Le Lann are oriented towards their US experience. They testify to an early French presence in the ARPANET project at two stages of its history: in 1969-1970, when the first nodes came into activity, and in 1973-1974, when TCP, which evolved into TCP/IP and became the Internet's flagship protocol, was defined, replacing NCP, which was at the heart of the ARPANET. They thus highlight crucial but different sides of the ARPANET's genesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, the man who first managed the ARPANET project and made the network come in to existence, Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts, gives his account of how the ARPANET came to be. He contributes his perspective on the many other innovations made to computer science by ARPA in the 1960s and 1970s, and shares his view on the contentious origin narratives surrounding the Internet, ARPANET and packet switching. He also talks about his life-long friendship and collaboration with another Internet/ARPANET pioneer, Leonard Kleinrock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ARPANET demonstrated that packet switching was an effective routing principle for computer networks, accelerating the evolution towards the current network paradigm, in which packetization is found in almost all forms of digital communication. The decision to use the packet switching principle was crucial to the development of the Internet and computer networking broadly, and in popular literature, packet switching is often attributed to three originators: Paul Baran, Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock. This paper does not concern itself with who invented packet switching, but rather, who had the greatest influence on the risky and highly consequential decision to base the ARPANET design on this previously untested technology. A close examination of the available documentation, including two newly re-emerged documents, indicate that Paul Baran had a much more substantial influence on the decision to use packet switching for ARPANET than most retellings of Internet history portray. The findings also show that Donald Davies' role in the adoption of packet switching as a dominant principle for digital communication may have been less impactful than depicted in current literature and that Kleinrock may have played a significant role in bringing packet switching to the ARPANET, influenced by interactions with Baran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ARPANET's story is part of the Internet's official heritage, as a first crucial step in its development. Janet Abbate's seminal work Inventing the Internet (1999) has extensively covered its history and is still a landmark in this area. However, the 50th anniversary of ARPANET provides an opportunity to reflect on existing histories and to open up the debate to new perspectives and approaches. If we consider ARPANET as a first step towards the Internet, how did it determine - and how does it continue to determine - our current understanding of the Internet? What is left to explore and discover in ARPANET's history? And if ARPANET is dead today, are its legacy and spirit still alive, and if so, in what way? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexandre Serres' PhD, "Aux sources d'Internet: l'émergence d'ARPANET" ("The origins of the Internet: the Emergence of ARPANET"), defended in 2000, is quite influential in Francophone research literature and discourse on Internet histories. However, yet untranslated, it has remained little known in Anglophone scholarly circles. The results of this thesis, which strongly echoes other articles and interviews, that are part of this special issue on ARPANET, remain still relevant and valid and we have chosen to introduce the reader to the final part of Serres' research - an inevitable choice within the 600 pages of this work [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper focuses on the Interface Message Processor (IMP), an important device in the history of ARPANET. Designed as the interface between ARPANET nodes and the common carrier telephone system, the IMP actualized the ARPANET as an experimental packet-switching communication system. We conceptualize the IMP as historical boundary object that exposes ARPANET's close relationship to the telephone system. Our analysis offers a novel history of ARPANET as a repurposing of the existing telephone infrastructure. Beyond the historical contribution, this approach has wider implications for the theory of media infrastructures, specifically the "inter-structuralism" of ARPANET and the nature of borders between seemingly disparate social, political, and technological regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of thoughts, ideas and other information fixed in a tangible medium of expression for purposes of reproducing, displaying or communicating the information to others has its origins in antiquity. Both the information itself and its symbolic expression are purely conceptual entities until fixed in a material object. When an intangible means of expression, in which symbolic logic is represented as or converted to machine-independent data structures in digital form, and structured as digital objects (i.e., digital entities), this implementation may be viewed as the logical equivalent of fixation in a material object; and, in this context, we are viewing a block as a particular way of structuring a digital object, and a blockchain in itself as a digital object that incorporates one or more objects. In considering the development of commerce based on the Digital Object (DO) Architecture, an interesting area for exploration and development has been introduced around the concept of mobile computer programs configured as digital objects. This technology may play an important role in the management of software embedded in new Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as microcontrollers, where issues have arisen with respect to the interoperability of such software with other resources in the developing IoT. There have been many efforts over the years to evolve the Internet to embrace new technology, such as the DO Architecture, and we hope this trend continues unabated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with Professor Leonard Kleinrock talking about the 35th anniversary of the launch of the ARPANET. Topics include employed queuing theory in the dissertation work; meeting Larry Roberts and Ivan Sutherland at Lincoln Lab and becoming directors of the IPTO at ARPA with Larry beginning as chief scientist in charge of designing the ARPANET; and asking about the first illegal use of Internet and at the same time the first online chat session.

The article shows in a cross-sectional way a fascinating journey through the history of the realization and evolution of human thought, based on the desire to develop an intellectual face of humanity. The Internet has become a key tool for this purpose. From the first „lo” to today’s standalone network systems, human development is increasingly associated with the cybernetic world. Will this lead to a great unification of human life and the web?

This paper investigated the factors responsible for the growth of Internet usage on the African continent. The principal finding was that increasing growth of Internet usage is also down to one singular factor: mobile communications technology. The proliferation of mobile phone usage in Africa has resulted in the sustained rise in Internet usage recently in Africa. Generally, accessing the Internet using a cellular phone involves little effort in terms of in situ huge infrastructure, many mobile phone subscribers thus use the cellular phone to access the Internet in order not to be left out of the fun the Internet offers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developed around 1973 by BBN under contract from DARPA, the private line interface (PLI), a cryptographic cybersecurity device used on the Arpanet, operated with minimal modification of the existing network infrastructure, sitting at the "edge" of the network between the network switches and the connected host computers. As a result of the developmental and infrastructural trajectory set in motion by the PLI, significant cryptographic resources remain at the edges (or ends) of the networks that constitute the Internet today. This study of the PLI is an entry into the historical relationship between cryptography and packet-switched computer networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a 2011 Anecdote department article in the Annals, Alex McKenzie provided an excellent account of the events between 1974 and 1976 leading up to INWG 96, a proposed internetwork transport protocol. McKenzie's anecdote focused on the events in INWG (International Network Working Group), which this article shows were a small part of a much larger debate that was going on outside. The author places the INWG discussions in this wider context to better understand the technical points and implications, their ultimate impact, and the paradigm shift that threatened established business models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The earliest and most widespread representation of the Arpanet were network graphs or maps that, arguably, remain its most prominent artifact. In an earlier article, the authors analyzed how the maps were created, what they represented, and how histories of the network parallel their emphases and omissions. Here, the authors begin a retooling of the maps to highlight further what is missing from them: communication flows, gateways to other networks, and hierarchies between its nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]