The Evolution of Networking

The narrative of traditional networking as it evolved into incentivized distributed decentralized networks.

`Computer networking refers to interconnected computing devices that can exchange data and share resources with each other. These networked devices use a system of rules, called communications protocols, to transmit information over physical or wireless technologies.``

What was the first network of computers in the world? The first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control was Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET)1 which also was the first to implement TCP/IP, a protocol suite.

What was the purpose of this ARPANET?

ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them. or
The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.

What happened to ARPANET? Decommissioned in 1990 after WWW privatized and commercialized the Internet.

What is the current network that we defined as the "Internet" as we know it today?

Note: The term 'Internet' can be a misnomer for the World Wide Web - a collection of documents and other resources linked by hyperlinks and URIs | the actual definition of the Internet is the global system of computer networks interconnected through telecommunications and optical networking)

The "Internet" is actually based on an Internet Protocol Suite (known as TCP/IP2) which includes Hyper-text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) designed by Tim Berners-Lee at Cern in 1989. Further development of the Internet via additional information transmission protocols and development discussion (see RFCs3,4,5) have been supported via Open Standards6 by a collection of entities. The list of entities contributing developments to these protocols include the IEEE, ISOC, IETF, IAB, and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium7) founded by Tim Berners-Lee who created the World Wide Web (WWW).

The forerunner of the World Wide Web and Arpanet was the Intergalactic Computer Network8 (IGCN).

What spawned the cypherpunk movement? Efforts to change the control and direction in which the early networks were being purposed for (military and nation-state surveillance) by shifting the dynamic to use crytography to enhance security in order to protect privacy and anonymity of citizens.

Why is there an effort to recreate the Internet? Post-development and maturity of the "Internet" brought about pushback against the status quo because of the highly privatized monopolies and fairly centralized access control points to connect to the Internet as we know it.

How were protocols developed then and now? Optimizing for specific data-type compression and transmission efficiency? (Expand)

Overlap between blockchain efforts of development of new protocols and early internet protocol design? Need more research. Early internet protocol design was partly non-profit and partly designed by for-profit companies although the profit model for protocol-usage was clearly less effective. Blockchain seems more capitalistic in motivation. Tokens can capture protocol usage in a way that traditional Web 1.0/2.0 protocol design could not leverage (did not exist).

What are we trying to solve by creating new blockchain-flavored versions of previously existing protocols? Anarcho-crypto-capitalism for distributed compute to buck the authoritarian centralized status quo of the Internet.9,10

How are current P2P Blockchain network topologies different than old Client-Server architectures?

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