School - I026: II - 2 examples of IT history which started before 1990 - one still existing, one dead.

This time the school session focuses on the internet history, where it started and where it has ended up to by now. We need to gather two examples of the internet history before 1990 and describe which one lives also today and which one has gone extinct.

Internet in early days

In the 1970 there where at many of different internet networks available: ARPANet, PRNET, Ethernet, AlohaNET, and according to name, my favorite, SatNET. Most of them where started and controlled by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), agency which was created after Soviets launched Sputnik.

There was a successful TCP protocol test over those networks on 1977.

ARPANet

As you know then ARPANet is basically today's internet forefather. All what we are using now for World Wide Web has evolved from this. There is not much to talk about it or speculate around it. It is constantly improving and evolving. Besides of traditional visible internet we have a lot of invisible internet and black internet.

Visible is all what we see when we enter some URL on the address bar. Web browser renders us a page and there we have it, some media, some text, some links, all for information. Invisible is the rest of it, all what you cannot see and it contains most of it. That is also not interesting, this can be read upon Wikipedia and rest of places. The interesting part which came from ARPANet is actually DarkWeb (dark net, deep web). A place where the actual life begins. Trades with crypto currency and kind of illegal services has made a perfect combination for criminals and people with shady deals. 

Anonymous Web

I believe that this is what is real future for ARPANet, moving to deep web. Future where we can claim back  anonymity of our identities, trade goods with people you don't know, have currency which is not under any government control, be a single nation in this world, not just people in some country. I am counting on that future.

SkyNet SatNet

Coming back to SatNet, then actually I kind of hope that it was bases of the Terminator and SkyNet story. Sounds about similar. Communication network which uses satellites to translate data between computers. The Terminator, movie from the 1984, where there was a self conscious neural network which found out that humanity is the greatest threat for the existence and  started to produce terminators to wipe out whom ever was left over from the nuclear attack. Awesome movie franchise. 

But talking about SatNet, it really didn't get the attention it could have got, I believe that there were a lot of technical issues to provide it word wide, starting from the maintenance fees of the satellites ending from latency issues which it would take to broadcast a signal to the space and back to the server and round tripping the data back. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of data available about it, at least I didn't find it in the future ARPANet, but if you have something, please post some links into comments.

Summary

Ah, yes, regarding to topic, summary: ARPANet -> Internet; SatNet ->Didn't end up being SkyNet, so for me, it is dead (although it can be operational for very limited brand of people).