Latest news with #Arpanet
Otago Daily Times
2 days ago
- Science
- Otago Daily Times
Event shares internet's military development
Dr Noel Packard explores the Cold War origins of the Internet. Photo: supplied Covert military origins beneath today's worldwide computer network will be revealed in two talks. Interdisciplinary social scientist Dr Noel Packard, of Auckland, will present her research into how the internet's foundations were quietly laid under Cold War secrecy during sessions at the New Zealand International Science Festival. Her University of Auckland media, film and television PhD thesis traces how the United States military network that became today's internet began as a way to electronically track political activists and communists. The first high-powered "interactive" computer networks were bankrolled by the US to fight a new kind of counterinsurgency warfare against communism. "Probably half of our taxpayer money went to the military in the Cold War, if not more," she said. The 1959 defence directive that authorised funding the experimental Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (Arpanet), precursor to the modern internet, required real-world trials. Trials ran in Vietnam, South America, the US and other countries. Electronic tracking of activists and the neutralisation of alleged communists proved the system's worth under the name of anti-communism. "That was a good patriotic thing that could get Congress to approve that amount of money to build this new kind of counterinsurgency." The seismic shift brought by the World Wide Web meant the pre-internet and post-internet eras should be distinguished, just as scholars separated BC and AD, pre and post-World War 2 or the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment, she said. To untangle the internet's early phases, Dr Packard collaborated with graphic designers to create infographics charting secret military tests in the 1960s-70s, wider distribution in the 1980s and full commercialisation as the public internet from the 1990s onward. One infographic depicts the development of the internet as a tree growing up through a lake: the leafy canopy above the water representing the public network, while the "submerged roots" underscore how much of the internet's foundation was built out-of-sight or to be "non-evident". For most users, those deep roots remain invisible. "I think it should be a common way of looking at internet history because if you have that understanding, you are more inclined to use the electronic media in a way that is more cautious or more careful. "People should know the dangers as well as the good things about the internet: where it came from, what the networks were used for, what they grew out of." Dr Packard will present her collaborative efforts with graphic designers Hannah Day, Milan Law and Emma Ryan, of Bowman Communications, to chart the history of pre-internet network in infographics during the New Zealand International Science Festival. Details Dr Noel Packard: Making Internet History More Visible Festival Hub 285 George St Tuesday, July 1, 2pm-3pm Wednesday, July 2, 11am-noon No tickets required
The Guardian
08-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Skype got shouted down by Teams and Zoom. But it revolutionised human connection
So Microsoft has decided to terminate Skype, the internet telephony company it bought in 2011 for $8.5bn (£6.6bn). Its millions of hapless users are to be herded into Microsoft Teams, a virtual encampment with a brain-dead aesthetic that makes even Zoom look cool. This eventuality had been telegraphed for quite a while but, even so, it comes as a jolt because Skype was a remarkable venture, and its demise closes a chapter of an interesting strand of technological history. The internet has been around for much longer than most people realise. It goes back to the 1960s and the creation of Arpanet, a military computer network that emerged after the US had its 'Sputnik moment' – the awful realisation that the Soviet Union seemed to be racing ahead in the technology stakes. The design of Arpanet's successor, the internet we use today, started in the early 1970s and it was first switched on in January 1983. The designers of the network were, from the outset, determined to avoid the limitations of earlier communication systems, particularly the analogue telephone network, which was optimised for voice, hopeless for digital signals and owned by corporations which resisted innovations that they themselves had not originated. So the new network would not have an owner or be optimised for any particular medium, and would therefore be more permissive than any earlier network. Anyone could access it, and create services that ran upon it, so long as their computers conformed to the protocols of the network. The result was the explosion of creativity – good and bad – that we are still living with today. What the internet's designers had built was what a scholar later called 'an architecture for permissionless innovation'; or, put another way, a global platform for springing surprises. The world wide web, created by Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980s, was one of those surprises. But so too was something called VoIP (voice over internet protocol). Speech could be digitised (converted into ones and zeroes) and put into data packets which could be sent over the internet; and then, having reached their destination, converted back into audio. The result: free telephony to anywhere in the world! Skype was the first company to bring this magic to ordinary consumers. It was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis (a Dane) and Niklas Zennström (a Swede) and headquartered in Luxembourg; but the software that powered it was written by three Estonians who also wrote software for peer-to-peer file sharing. In 2005, eBay bought it for $2.6bn (£2bn). By 2006 it had 100m registered users and by 2009 was adding about 380,000 new users each day and generating around $740m (£575m) in annual revenue. So you could say that Skype was the first European company to reach US-level scale. At which point the inevitable happened: in 2011 Skype was bought by Microsoft and absorbed into the maw of the tech colossus. Many observers, including this columnist, wondered what Microsoft thought it was doing with its new toy. Last week's news suggests that the company never quite figured it out. And in any event, once the pandemic arrived in 2020 and people started working from home, it was clear that Microsoft would need to have something to ward off the threat posed by Zoom. Skype conceivably could have been at the core of its response, but instead the decision was made to put all the energy into making Teams the behemoth's answer to remote working. From then on, Skype was surplus to requirements and the die was cast. Before it disappears, though, it's worth remembering what an energising newcomer it was on the scene two decades ago. Most people nowadays have no idea how closed and depressing telephony was in the analogue era. It was an industry run either by complacent, unresponsive and domineering monopolies (AT&T in the US) or government agencies (the GPO in the UK). It could take months to get a telephone installed in your home. Phone calls were expensive and international calls positively prohibitive. I grew up in a country (Ireland) with a huge diaspora in a time when a phone call from the US meant only one thing: a death in the family. If emigrants kept in touch with the folks back home, it was only by letter and perhaps the odd parcel; never by phone. In rural Ireland, on the night before a son or a daughter departed for America or Australia, their family would sometimes hold a wake, because they assumed they would never hear their voices again. And now? The VoIP technology that Skype brought into people's lives has been commoditised. Social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal offer unlimited – and free – audio (and video) connections with friends, families and colleagues all over the world. Phone calls that would once have bankrupted a family are made every day. Microsoft may not have found Skype useful in the end. But the rest of us certainly did. Three-market economy Dave Karpf's sharp essay identifies the three types of money behind Silicon Valley's power. Bringing back sovereignty An insightful editorial in Noema by Nathan Gardels on why the current and 47th US president is behaving like the 25th. Fighting talk A seismic regulatory clash is in the offing, says David Allen Green's prescient analysis in the Financial Times.
