Video: Nerds 2.0.1 A Brief History of the Internet, Volume one: Networking the Nerds
-Internet History (see  Hobbes's Timeline )
-The idea of a computer network of shared data was first envisioned by J.R. Licklider ("Lick") at MIT in 1962.
-The first moves toward creating the Internet was in response to the first artificial satellit, Sputnik, that the USSR launched in 1957.
-Science, engineering and technology became an important priority of funding for the U.S. because of Sputnik.
-The two main efforts cited in the video are the SPACE RACE to the moon, and creating a digital network between mainframe computers.
-In the late 1960s computers took up whole rooms of space and people shared time on them via keyboard & monitor (dumb terminals).
-The army Pentagon office of Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was granted money to start the first digital network.  Bob Taylor was the head of the Pentagon Office that got the money and put out a call for proposals to engineering companies to build the first digital network.
-Larry Roberts from MIT coordinated the bid designs.
-BBN (Bolt, Beranek, & Newman) engineering firm in Cambridge MA, was awarded the money to build the first digital network between mainframe computers in 1968.
-The main people at BBN were Frank Hart, Bob Kahn, Dave Walden, & Severo Ornstein.
-The theory of packet switching was developed by Lenonard Kleinrock at UCLA (Len and Larry Roberts from MIT liked to gamble at casinos). Len's PhD dissertation uncovered the theory of packet switching, burst communication and data networking.
-The first router on the internet was called an IMP (Internet Message Processor) and it was installed in Len Kleinrock's lab just after Labor Day in 1969.
-The first message sent on the Internet was "LOGIN", but the system failed on the "G".
-The Internet began in the 1960s which was a time of social change in the United States.  The personal computer was viewed as a tool for social change by thinkers such as Ted Nelson (author of Computer Lib), Stewart Brand, and Howard Rheingold.
-The Alohanet was started by Norm Abramson's research on connecting computers in Hawaii to the Internet.  Norm liked to surf.
-1972 Ray Thomlinson from BBN writes the first e-mail program and chooses the @ sign for e-mail addresses.  Most computer and network people did not believe e-mail would be used much, but it soon took over as the number one application on the ARPANET.
-Vint Cerf (Standford Univ) and Bob Kahn (BBN) develop ideas to create a protocol that will link networks together (a "meta" protocol).  Their seminal paper "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection" is published in 1974 which laid out the blueprint for TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)
Nerds 2.0.1 A Brief History of the Internet, Volume Two: Connecting the Suits
-1978 Bob Metcalf from Xerox Parc starts asking venture capitalists how to start a company.  Bob thinks he can sell ethernet.  In June 1979 he starts 3Com (Computer Communications Compatibility).  3Com begins selling ethernet boards (first PC network cards) in 1982.
-1982 First SUN Workstation.  SUN (Stanford Univeristy Network) coined the phrase "The Network IS the Computer".
-Margaret Jacks Hall at Stanford Univ. (Computer Sci.) is where CISCO Systems, Silicon Graphics Inc, and SUN all started.  For each company, the students were allowed to walk away from Stanford with the intellectual property and start a company.  Stanford Univ. did not make any money from these companies.  These companies now have a net worth totaling over 100 Billion Dollars.
-SUN (Stanford Univ. Network) Microsystems was started by Andy Bechtolscheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy.  They marketed the first Unix workstation and coined the term "The Network IS the Computer".
-Novell Netware became (and still is) a software product that allows PCs to be connected together over a network using a file server.  Novell was originally a hardware company started by Mormons in Utah.  Drew Major was a contractor for software for the company and developed the Netware Operating system so PCs could share files, printers, and run e-mail over file servers.  Ray Norda was the venture capitalist who got the company out of financial trouble and moved it away from hardware into networking.  By the Late 80s and early 90s Netware was the dominant software product used on file servers to network PCs.  It is still a major player and is used extensively here at UVM.

GIANT BRAINS history of computing video shown last lecture.
-Most machines do only one thing.  Computers are different than any other machine in history because they can do many things (word process, search the web, drawings, communication tool, etc.).  Therefore computers have been called the "Universal Machines".
-Computers manipulate representations of reality.  They are very mind-like and are closest to the mind than any other machine yet invented.
-Computers were invented to do arithmetic and deciphering.
-William Shanks, an english school teacher, spent 28 years of his life working on calculating Pi to 707 places.  A modern desktop computer can do this in seven seconds or less.  Shanks made a mistake at the 528th place so the last years of his effort were in vain!
-A "Computer" in Shanks's day was a PERSON who performed calculations with pencil, paper, slide-rule, logarithm tables, etc.
- Charles Babbage was a victorian mathemetician who was obsessed with the accuracy of numerical tables.  He compared the calculated results of table prepared independently by two human computers and found mistakes.  Babbage designed a calculator called the "difference engine" and later a programmable general purpose computer called the analytical engine in the 1840s.  Babbage got the idea for using punched cards for storage of programs from the  Jacquard Loom .
- Ada Byron (Countess of Lovelace) worked with Babbage and is considered by many to be the first computer programmer.
- The definition of a "computer" changed from a person to a machine during a ten year period from 1935-1945.
-  Konrad Zuse developed a programmable digital computer using binary numbers with telephone relays in Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  During WW II Zuse used discarded movie film to program his computers and get around wartime shortages.  Zuse wanted to get funding from the German High Command to build a computer out of vacuum tubes, but was turned down.
-First computer with vacuum tubes was  ENIAC invented at the Moore School of electrical engineering between 1943-1946.  Eniac was invented by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert and designed to calculate firing tables for guns for the US Army.  ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes and filled a room 20 feet by 30 feet.  Eniac had to be re-wired when it was programmed.
-In Britian during the war  Alan Turing developed a strategy to crack German codes that were ciphered on the  Enigma enciphering machine.  Turing helped build the Colossus which deciphered German encrypted messages in WW II.
-Turing was interested in artificial intelligence and devised the Turing Test.  Duirng the Turing test a person communicates with an entity via a screen and keyboard.  After five minutes of communication you must decide whether the entity has any intelligence.  Today most people agree that machines have routinely passed the Turing test.