English 165CI
Notes for Class 12

This page contains materials intended only to facilitate class discussion (excerpts from online reading materials, outlines of issues, links to resources that may be mentioned in class, etc.). The materials are not the same as the instructor's notes for the class and are thus not designed to represent the full exposition or logic of the class.
  1. 20th-Century Paradigms of Information
  2. Bibliography of History of Computing
  3. A Short History of Information Technology in the 20th Century (material from Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Literary History and the Culture of Information, work-in-progress under contract with Stanford Univ. Press)
    1. Progenitor Developments
    2. World War II to 1952
    3. The Mainframe Era: Late 1950's to late 1970's | Commentary | Mainframe Paradigm
    4. Personal Computing/Networking Era: Late 1970's to Present | Commentary | Networking Paradigm
  4. Definition of TCP/IP (the Internet protocol for "packet-switched" information transmission)
  5. from Alan Liu, Ultrabasic Guide to the Internet for Humanities Users at UCSB (on the nature of the Internet)
1. 20th-Century Paradigms of Information:

Paradigms of Information Representative Devices
Communication Telephone
Media Radio, TV, Magazines
Mainframe Computing Mainframe/Dumb Terminal
Network Computing Personal Computer in Client-Server Network

2. Bibliography of History of Computing:
3. A Short History of Information Technology in the 20th Century (material from Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Literary History and the Culture of Information, work-in-progress under contract with Stanford Univ. Press) (Please do not quote without permission, since the book is not published yet)
4. Definition of TCP/IP (the Internet protocol for "packet-switched" information transmission) from Microsoft Press Computer Dictionary, 3rd. ed. (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1997):
5. Alan Liu, from Ultrabasic Guide to the Internet for Humanities Users at UCSB (Santa Barbara, CA: UCSB Bookstore, 1994), "Capsule History" of the Internet, pp. 47-48:)

The Internet is the global "network of networks" or meta-network that currently links over 2,217,000 host or server computers around the world via hardwire, satellite, and other communication channels. Most of these nodes serve multiple, local computers.

Initiated in 1969 with just four nodes (at UCLA, Stanford, University of Utah, and UCSB), the Internet--then known as ARPAnet--was originally developed under Pentagon sponsorship in part to sustain U. S. computer connectivity in the event of a nuclear strike. The design specifications called for it to connect point A to Z over just about any mismatched assortment of intervening hardware and software routes; and to do so flexibly such that the destruction of some routes would not block data getting through by other means. In the beginning, that is, the Internet was what contemporary cinema calls "post-apocalypse." It was the information highway for the road warrior.

How to ensure connectivity amid the hypothetical rubble? The elegant savagery of the solution parallels "a thousand plateaus," "lines of flight," "multiplicities," "schizophrenia," "packs," "many wolves," "bodies without organs," and all the rest of the screaming, postmodern philosophical horde. The solution lay in "packet-switching." In packet-switched data transmission (later standardized in the TCP/IP protocol that is the circulatory system of the present Internet), messages are broken up into discrete "packets" each prefaced by a header identifying its origin, destination, and sequential position in the overall message. Then the packets are released like a flock of carrier pigeons to find their own way across a patchwork of nodes each of which assigns routing directions "on the fly." (As it were: "Weather advisory: heavy network traffic in the north; fly south." Or again: "nuclear strike in Chicago; go through Dallas.") To stay with the metaphor: some packets fly north, some south; some make a beeline, some get tired and rest for a while. But in the end (usually), all arrive at the destination and are reassembled in their original order.

As evidenced by the logarithmic increase in nodes, users, and uses during the '70's and '80's, the Internet concept was highly successful--so successful, indeed, that it rapidly outgrew its original military framework (a separate military MILnet split off in 1983). In 1989, the National Science Foundation (NSF) took over sponsorship of the Internet and initiated a series of bandwidth and speed upgrades to the national linkway or "backbone." Participation by educational, government, and other such institutions was subsidized on the understanding (formalized in an AUP or Accepted Use Policy) that the Internet could not be used for commercial purposes.

By the 1990's, however, the business world wanted in as well. Much of the current story of the Internet, therefore, has to do not only with its outreach to such previously underconnected portions of the research-and-education community as humanities departments and undergraduates but with the creation of CIX, CommerceNet, MecklerWeb, and other commercial extensions of the Net. These "net profit" universes, as it were, are hard at work trying to adapt the decentralized, "many to many" pragmatics of the Net to the traditional "one to many" structures of mass-marketing (and vice versa). Such mainstreaming has been paralleled by a frenzy of Internet coverage in newspapers, TV, and other conventional one-to-many broadcast media. As witnessed in the salacious opportunism of the 1994 Los Angeles Times "scoop" on pornographic graphics files secreted in a publicly-funded research computer, or again--with a different kind of lust--in the recent, wall-to-wall press coverage of telecommunication and cable company mergers promising the proverbial "500 channels of on-demand entertainment," the one-to-many media does not yet know quite what to make of the legitimacy of many-to-many networking. Either the Net is all pornography or it is the corporate promised land. As of 1994, the NSF is officially ceding Internet sponsorship to the private sector and retiring its no-commercial-use rule. Concommitantly, therefore, the Internet has suddenly begun to worry about such prerequisites for doing business online as "authentication," "encryption," and "pricing structure."