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40 Years Old Already...

An internet that speaks to you

Progress towards making the net more multi-lingual is welcome says Bill Thompson.

It is 40 years to the week since the first data packets were sent over the Arpanet.

That was the research network commissioned by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) to see whether computer-to-computer communications could be made faster, more reliable and more robust by using the novel technique of packet switching instead of the more conventional circuit switched networks of the day.

Instead of connecting computers rather as telephone exchanges work, using switches to set up an electric circuit over which data could be sent, packet switching breaks a message into chunks and sends each chunk - or packet - separately, reassembling them at the receiving end.

Late on October 29 1969 Charley Kline sat down at a computer in the computer laboratory at UCLA, where he was a student, and established a link to a system at the nearby Stanford Research Institute, sending the first data packets over the nascent Arpanet.

“ This will finally allow users of these domains to have a domain name that is entirely in characters based on their native language, and marks an important point in the internationalisation of the whole internet. ”
Bill Thompson

Later in the year permanent links were made between four sites in the US, and over the following years the ARPANET grew into a worldwide research network.

Arpanet was one of the computer networks that coalesced into today's internet, and the influence of the standards and protocols established there can still be seen today, making this anniversary as important for historians of the network society as July's celebration of the 1969 Apollo 11 landing is for those who study space science.

Technology does not stand still, and over the years the way computers communicate with each other has changed enormously. Early Arpanet computers used the Network Control Protocol to talk to each other, but in 1983 this was replaced with the more powerful and flexible TCP/IP - the transmission control protocol and internet protocol.

Today we are in the process of migrating our networks from IP version 4 to IP version 6, which allows for more devices to be connected to the network and is more secure and robust, but work continues to improve and refine all aspects of the network architecture.

One area that is changing is the domain name system, DNS. This links the unique number that identifies every device on the internet with one or more names, making it possible to type in "www.bbc.co.uk" and go to the right web server without having to remember its number.

Designed by engineer Paul Mockapetris in 1983, DNS is a vital component of the network as well as the web, including e-mail and instant messaging. Every time a programme uses a name for a computer instead of a number, DNS is involved.

However DNS, like so much of the network's architecture, was developed by English-speaking westerners, and its original design only allowed standard ASCII characters to be used in names.

ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a way of representing letters, numbers and punctuation in the binary code used by computers, and was originally based on old telegraphic codes.

It works really well for English, but had to be extended and updated to cope with other alphabets, and has now been replaced by the much more powerful and capable Unicode standard, able to represent non-Latin languages as well as those based on the Latin alphabet.

Being able to write in your own language is one thing, but it's also important to be able to have e-mail or website addresses that use it. Unfortunately the design of DNS meant that key aspects would not work with anything other than ASCII, making it impossible to simply add in Chinese or Arabic characters to domain.

Work has been going on since the mid 90's to change this and provide what are called "internationalized domain names", and many organisations are now able to have websites and email addresses that include Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and many other alphabets.

The process took a significant step forward this week when Icann, the international body that looks after domain names, fast-tracked a proposal to provide internationalised versions of two letter country domains, such as .uk and .jp.

This will finally allow users of these domains to have a domain name that is entirely in characters based on their native language, and marks an important point in the internationalisation of the whole internet.

It has taken a long time to make this happen, but the problems of re-engineering such a key part of the network infrastructure without breaking anything are enormous, and anyone who reads through the technical documentation will see just how complex the process has been.

And it was definitely necessary to do it properly - the fuss over the recent retuning of Freeview boxes in the UK was bad enough, but trying to persuade a billion internet users to update their software to support a new form of DNS would have been impossible.

Over the next five years the majority of new internet users will come from the non English-speaking world. It's good to see that those of us who have helped build the network so far are making it more welcoming for them.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

21st Century Revolution

Try to think back to your life at the end of the last century. What was it like? Do you remember listening to music on CDs? Owning a phone primarily in order to make phone calls? Going to a library to search for information? Buying a map when embarking on a journey? Now compose a list of 10 ways in which your life has changed since. Here are mine:

1 Google In 2002, this was still a bunch of visionaries without a business plan. In just under four years, it went from earning nothing to earning $20bn a year. It accounts for 70% of all searches for information in the world. In October 2006, it splashed out $1.6bn for YouTube, another company without a business plan that was itself barely 18 months old. YouTube now notches up 1 billion searches a day. During the first nine years of the 21st century, American newspaper revenues declined by roughly 50%. Google is on a grandiose journey to digitise just about every word, painting, note, street, mountain, stream, ocean, book, newspaper, animal, insect, photograph and email that ever existed. "Google" passed into common parlance as a verb in around 2002. You google, I google, we all google. It is the most revolutionary word of the decade.

2 Wikipedia How do I know that the first recorded use of the verb "to google" was 8 July 1998, and that Google itself initially used lawyers to discourage the use of the word-as-verb? From Wikipedia – the half-baked, crazy idea of Jimmy Wales (and others) launched in January 2001. How could such a stupid notion – an encyclopedia written by anyone and everyone – ever work? Whatever next? Short answer: the English-language version now has 3 million articles and 1 billion words (which is – according to Wikipedia – 25 times the size of Encyclopaedia Britannica).

3 Twitter Another really stupid idea. As if anything worth saying could possibly be said in 140 characters. Who are these sad people who want to know that some other sad person is waiting for a bus or has just changed a nappy? OK, so there are roughly 18 million of them, but what on earth do they talk about? Yes, people still write/say that. Smarter people recognise that Twitter is one stage on from Google – applying human intelligence and recommendation to the ordering of information… in real time. It makes algorithms look so 1990s.

4 Comment Is Free A plug for the home team here. Launched in March 2006, CiF inverted the traditional model of newspaper comment. That model went as follows: a small number of columnists opined on politics, culture and events. The readers responded by letter or email: a tiny proportion of that response saw the light of day. This assumed if you were, for example, a New York Times reader, that Thomas L Friedman was the one voice you wanted to hear on Venezuela, the Middle East, Russia, Rwanda, Italy, China and Afghanistan. Comment Is Free started from the assumption that – with intelligent editing and moderating – there were thousands of people with voices and opinions worth hearing and that something powerful, plural and diverse could be forged from combining a newspaper's columnists with those other voices. Millions read it every month; around 100,000 actively take part. Work in progress, but it's difficult to imagine ever going back to the old model.

5 BBC iPlayer Launched at the end of 2007 and – again – already it's impossible to imagine life without the ability to view, or listen to, programmes in your own time. And, of course, that leads to the really radical thought that one day anyone will be able to access any BBC content created at any point in the last 70 years via the iPlayer… for free. Unless James Murdoch has really got David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt in some kind of headlock, in which case you'll have to pay for it. Assuming the BBC still exists in any recognisable form.

6 iPhone Launched in June 2007. Can you remember the moment when you first held one? The involuntary gasp as you saw what it could do? The touch screen, the rotating screen, the zooming screen! The satellite street view, the maps, the iPod and phone all in one slick sliver of beauty. And that was just the start. Jonathan Zittrain, the enormously brainy Oxford-and-Harvard web guru, denounced the original iPhone as "sterile" – on the basis that it was a device that only Apple could improve or change. That was way back in June 2008, since when 1 billion iPhone apps have been downloaded and the only limit to what a mobile phone could become is human imagination itself.

7 Craigslist Until 2000, this classified advertising database existed only in San Francisco. Come the new millennium, it expanded into nine more US cities. It is now in nearly 600 cities in more than 50 countries (thank you, Wikipedia). I remember a Guardian Media Group board meeting when one of our in-house digital gurus patiently explained its business model – essentially, free to both advertiser and reader. It then operated from a small building in San Francisco and had 17 employees. I sat there thinking, "This is the beginning of the end for local newspapers." Nothing has happened since to change my mind.

8 Facebook All the silly things people say about Twitter (see above), they said about Facebook. And still do. What a pointless waste of time! Who are these people with empty lives? Etc etc. It is so pointless that there are now more than 300 million people active on the site, doing their pointless things. But, really, to think that, you would have to think it was pointless to want to connect, to create, to share creativity or thought, to discuss, to collaborate, to form groups or to combine with others in mutual interests or passions. If you can't see the point of any of those things, you will not see the point of Facebook.

9 iTunes U Launched in May 2007 and still relatively unknown. The theory is that every university in the world – most of them benefiting from significant public funding – can share all their course lessons, lectures, language classes and laboratory demonstrations with everyone else. For those who haven't discovered it, you find it through iTunes itself. Tap in any search term you want, and it will deliver you content from all the partner universities, which you can then carry around with you on your iPod or iPhone (see above) to listen to on buses, at airports, on long car journeys or (if you are insomniac like me) throughout the night. Take the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) and the Open University, and multiply by 10,000.

10 Spotify Launched generally only eight months ago, Spotify is even more life-changing than iTunes, with a library of six million tracks, including a remarkable amount of really quite esoteric classical music. It is – at least at the time of writing – all free, providing you don't mind putting up with the occasional advertisement. Was there really a time when, in order to listen to a particular concerto or symphony, you had to either buy it or scan Radio Times to see if Radio 3 had scheduled it? Incredible to think of those dark ages. Now – so long as you don't mind not "owning" music – you can listen to more or less anything more or less any time. A small Eee PC, hooked up to your sound system, will cost no more than a mid-price tuner. A lifetime of musical exploration beckons.

I make no claims for all of these being the most significant developments in communication over the last decade. They are simply 10 of the inventions and launches that have most affected me. I would find it hard to imagine returning to a life without any of them. Between them they have created the greatest explosion of democracy; access to information; potential for creativity; and the ability to connect and communicate the world has ever seen. They are, each of them, profoundly disruptive and revolutionary, and with consequences that will ripple on through time future. Some (most?) may be transitory, to be replaced by even more transformatory innovations; some more permanent. In just under 10 years they – and millions of developments, technologies and websites like them – have changed the world profoundly.

by Alan Rusbridger