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This month was the internet's 30th birthday. Well, maybe it was. That depends on the meaning of the words "birthday" and "internet". Professor Leonard Kleinrock is one of several contending 'fathers' of the internet. Back when I was a mere graduate student, starting in the 1960s, Kleirock was a lead architect of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network - the ARPAnet. Kleinrock says the internet was born with the installation of the ARPAnet's first Interface Message Processor (Imp) in his lab at the University of California at Los Angeles on September 2, 1969. ARPAnet Imps were packet-switching minicomputers, pre-Cisco routers, developed at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), in Cambridge, Massachusetts. BBN, has since merged into GTE, which will soon probably be merged into Bell Atlantic. There are post-ARPAnet people who say the internet was not born until the ARPAnet's protocols were replaced by TCP/IP in 1983. Others think the internet is the World Wide Web, which was born (forgetting Tim Berners-Lee) with the Netscape circa 1995. I think the internet was born in 1973 with the invention of the Ethernet (CSMA/CD) LAN and the internet (TCP/IP) WAN. And so on. But hey, there's enough credit to go around. Professor Kleinrock, thank you, congratulations, and happy 30th! On this occasion, and because we're more interested in the future than the past, let's explore some possibilities for the internet's next 30 years.
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