Sputnik created the Internet! Remember Sputnik? Well, maybe you at least heard of it. The first communication satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, that beeped its way across the skies of the world and in particular the United States. Sputnik sent tremors through the heart of the Pentagon. The message the High Command heard from all that beeping was that Soviet scientists were ahead of U.S. scientists in the race-for-space. Not that Soviet scientists were smarter than American scientists but they were better organized. Soviet scientists had common funding and therefore worked toward a common goal. American scientists worked in diverse institutions on diverse projects with little or no coordination. The solution was to create an interconnection of American scientists for a network of scientific information: an Internet. To fund this awesome task, the Defense Department created an agency and naturally gave it an acronym: ARPA.

ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was created to coordinate communications among U.S. scientists and enhance technological development. The principal task of ARPA was to explore the possibility of sharing computer information among educational institutions: get scientific computers to talk to other scientific computers. The challenge was ten years in search of a solution.

Finally the Internet found a creator. In 1969, at Boelter Hall, UCLA, a research Professor, Leonard Kleinrock, with a team of graduate students, implemented a theory Kleinrock developed called packet-switching: a technology to get computers to "talk to one another." On a November afternoon, Kleinrock and his team sent a message, via telephone lines, from a UCLA computer to a computer in San Francisco. Kleinrock typed the message, "Are you receiving this?" and a reply came back, "yes." Kleinrock and his team were euphoric. And well they should have been -- they had launched the information superhighway -- the Internet.

Essentially, packet-switching means: one computer takes a message, wraps it in special software, forms an electrical envelope, then sends it by modem, through telephone lines to another computer. The second computer strips the packet's envelope and opens the message. The communication is "friendly" as long as each computer contains compatible software, called protocol. A modem translates computer talk into telephone talk. The wrapping software contains coded protocol and computer addresses. Each computer knows where the packet is going and where it came from. In a nutshell, when we surf the net, we're really eavesdropping on computer telephone conversations; in all, a nice piece of work by Professor Kleinrock.

ARPANET ran with Kleinrock's technology and developed a network of computer links among educational institutions. These links accumulated into a major trunk line called the backbone. Now scientists could collectively share information by tapping into the backbone and swapping packets across the network. Others found a way to attach to the backbone. Wherever computers and telephone lines existed, attachments to the Internet trunk-line became possible. Eventually, what started as a limited project, extended itself across national and international borders and, like Topsy, it just grew. Currently, connections also involve cables and satellites; nobody's in charge but, like the economy, it works, and nobody's really sure how.

But the real Internet, what we know as the Information Super Highway, didn't come into vogue until the 1990s. It took twenty years to arrive. Why so long? Well, networking was going on, but principally in the realm of universities, large businesses and techie-types. Access was tedious, the software was cryptic, and the content was largely academic but, approaching the 1990s, that all changed. Microsoft's introduction of Windows made PCs more friendly, the browser software made Internet access easier, and Internet content became more interesting.

Windows replaced the text driven DOS horrors with pictures and mouse clicks. DOS required typing long esoteric strings of text to make Internet connections work; then Windows introduced click-and-go-icons to get the same job done. This in turn led to the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) browser. A WWW browser takes advantage of Windows click-and-go capability to allow the mouse to surf smoothly around the Net. Browser software made the Internet pretty, informative, and fun. The arcane Internet became the Internet for everyone.

Everyone, that is, with the proper hardware/software and a server connection. The hardware consists of a computer, a modem and a telephone line. The software is the browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer). The server is an outside commercial computer, called an Internet Service Provider (ISP), leased by a user for about $20/month. The ISP handles all that packet-switching traffic.

It took a while for the Internet to get into the hands of the masses. Its growth rate has been mind boggling. It feeds the pangs of an information hungry world. It may be out of hand but it's handy to use. It's here to stay. Maybe now we know what all that beeping was about from Sputnik.