RFC 1462

FYI on "What is the Internet?" 🌸

• Network Working Group 💜
• RFC 1462, filed as FYI 20 (so it's info, not a standard) 📌
• Authors: E. Krol (University of Illinois) and E. Hoffman (Merit Network, Inc.) 👩‍💻
• Date: May 1993 🗓️
• Obsoletes / Updates: the title block doesn't list any RFCs this one obsoletes or updates 🙈

Status of This Memo 🧾

okay so this memo is giving info for the Internet community. It is NOT a standard, lol. Distribution is unlimited, so share it with everyone you know 💅

Abstract ✨

this FYI RFC answers the big question, "What is the Internet?" 🌐 It came from the User Services Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 🫶 It's a tweaked chapter from Ed Krol's 1992 book, "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog," and it covers what the Internet is, its history, how it's run, its protocols, how it's paid for, and the current drama around growth, commercialization, and privatization 📚💖

Introduction 🎀

ok so "What is the Internet?" gets asked SO often, and it's because there's no single agreed-upon answer that neatly sums it up 🙃 You can think about the Internet in terms of its shared protocols, as a physical pile of routers and circuits, as a set of shared resources, or even as an attitude about connecting and communicating with each other 🦋 Some definitions people have given over the years include:

• a network of networks based on the TCP/IP protocols,
• a community of people who use and develop those networks,
• a collection of resources that can be reached from those networks.

Today's Internet is a global resource connecting millions of users 🌍✨ It started as an experiment over 20 years ago by the U.S. Department of Defense, and honestly that's iconic 👑 The networks that make up the Internet run on a standard set of protocols (a mutually agreed-upon way for parties to communicate 🤝). The Internet also has gateways to networks and services that run on other protocols, so it's not a total closed club 🧚

To answer the question more fully, the rest of this paper is an updated second chapter from Ed Krol's 1992 book, "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog," with a much more thorough explanation 💜 (It's published with the generous permission of the publisher, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., so shoutout to them 🙌)

The Internet (excerpt from "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog") 🌈

The Internet was born about 20 years ago when people tried to connect a U.S. Defense Department network called the ARPAnet with various other radio and satellite networks 📡 The ARPAnet was an experimental network built to support military research, specifically research into how to build networks that could survive partial outages (like bomb attacks) and still keep working 💪 (Keep this in mind when I describe how the network works, because it explains a lot about how the Internet was designed 🔍) In the ARPAnet model, communication always happens between a source computer and a destination computer 🖥️ The network itself was assumed to be unreliable, meaning any part of it could vanish at any moment (pick your favorite disaster, but these days backhoes cutting cables are a bigger threat than bombs 🚧😭). It was designed to need the bare minimum of information from the computer clients. To send a message, a computer just had to stuff its data into an envelope called an Internet Protocol (IP) packet and "address" the packets correctly 📦 The communicating computers, not the network itself, were also responsible for making sure the communication actually got done ✅ The philosophy was that every computer on the network could talk to any other computer as an equal peer 🫂

These decisions might sound weird, like assuming the network is "unreliable," but history has shown that most of them were pretty much correct 🙌 Meanwhile, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was spending years designing the ultimate standard for computer networking, and people just couldn't wait 🕰️ Internet developers in the US, UK, and Scandinavia responded to market pressures and started putting their IP software on every possible type of computer 💻 It quickly became the only practical way for computers from different manufacturers to talk to each other, which was super attractive to the government and universities 🎓 Those places didn't have policies saying all computers had to come from the same vendor, so everyone bought whatever they liked and expected their machines to work together over the network 🤷‍♀️✨

Around the same time the Internet was coming together, Ethernet local area networks ("LANs") were being developed 🔌 The tech matured quietly until desktop workstations showed up around 1983 💫 Most of these workstations came with Berkeley UNIX, which included IP networking software, and that created a new demand 🔥 Instead of connecting to one big timesharing computer per site, organizations wanted to connect the ARPAnet to their entire local network, so every computer on that LAN could access ARPAnet resources 🖥️🖥️🖥️ At about the same time, other organizations started building their own networks using the same protocols as the ARPAnet, namely IP and its relatives 🕸️ It became obvious that if these networks could talk to each other, users on one network could communicate with users on another, and everyone would benefit 🥰

One of the most important of these newer networks was the NSFNET, commissioned by the National Science Foundation (NSF), a U.S. government agency 🏛️ In the late 80's, the NSF created five supercomputer centers 🚀 Until then, the world's fastest computers had only been available to weapons developers and a few researchers at very large corporations 🙄 By creating supercomputer centers, the NSF made these resources available for any scholarly research 📖 Only five centers were created because they were so expensive, so they had to be shared 💸 That created a communications problem: the centers needed a way to connect to each other and to let their clients access them 📞 At first the NSF tried using the ARPAnet for this, but that strategy failed because of bureaucracy and staffing problems 😤

So the NSF decided to build its own network based on the ARPAnet's IP technology 💡 It connected the centers with 56,000 bit-per-second (56k bps) telephone lines 📞 (That's roughly the ability to transfer two full typewritten pages per second. Slow by modern standards, but pretty fast in the mid-80's 🥹) Obviously, though, if they tried to connect every university directly to a supercomputing center, they'd go broke 💀 You pay for those phone lines by the mile, and one line per campus with a supercomputing center at the hub, like spokes on a bike wheel, adds up to a LOT of miles 🚲 So they created regional networks instead 🗺️ In each area of the country, schools were connected to their nearest neighbor, and each chain was connected to a supercomputer center at one point, with the centers connected to each other too 🔗 With this setup, any computer could eventually talk to any other by having the conversation forwarded through its neighbors 🫶

This solution was a huge success, and like any successful solution, a time came when it stopped working 😩 Sharing supercomputers also let the connected sites share lots of other things unrelated to the centers, so suddenly these schools had a whole world of data and collaborators at their fingertips 🌏 Traffic kept climbing until the computers controlling the network, and the phone lines connecting them, were overloaded 🥵 In 1987, a contract to manage and upgrade the network was awarded to Merit Network Inc., which ran Michigan's educational network, in partnership with IBM and MCI 🤝 The old network was replaced with telephone lines that were faster by a factor of 20, plus faster computers to control it 🏎️

running out of horsepower and then getting bigger engines and better roads is still happening today, and it's giving constant growth 📈

Unlike changes to the highway system, most of these changes aren't noticed by the people using the Internet to get real work done 🙃 You won't go to your office, log in, and find a message saying the Internet will be inaccessible for the next six months because of improvements 😌 Even more important, the process of running out of capacity and improving the network has created a technology that's extremely mature and practical 💎 The ideas have been tested, problems have popped up, and problems have been solved ✅

For our purposes, the most important part of the NSF's networking effort is that it let everyone access the network 🌸 Before that, Internet access was only available to researchers in computer science, government employees, and government contractors 🙅‍♀️ The NSF promoted universal educational access by only funding campus connections if the campus had a plan to spread that access around, so everyone attending a four-year college could become an Internet user 🎓💜

The demand keeps growing 🚀 Now that most four-year colleges are connected, people are trying to get secondary and primary schools connected too 🏫 People who graduated from college know what the Internet is good for, and they talk their employers into connecting corporations 💼 All of this activity points to continued growth, networking problems to solve, evolving technologies, and job security for networkers 🧑‍💻🔥

What Makes Up the Internet? 🧩

okay this one is a tricky question, because the answer changes over time 🌀 Five years ago it would have been easy: "All the networks, using the IP protocol, which cooperate to form a seamless network for their collective users." That included various federal networks, a set of regional networks, campus networks, and some foreign networks 🌐

More recently, some non-IP networks realized the Internet was good and wanted to offer its services to their own clientele 👀 So they developed ways to connect these "strange" networks (like Bitnet, DECnets, etc.) to the Internet 🔌 At first these connections, called "gateways," only transferred electronic mail between the two networks 📧 Some, though, have grown to translate other services between the networks as well ✨ So are they part of the Internet? Maybe yes, maybe no 🤔 It depends on whether, in their hearts, they want to be 💅 If that sounds strange, keep reading, because it gets stranger 🫣🌈

Who Governs the Internet? 👑

Okay so the Internet is kinda like a church ⛪💖. It's got a council of elders, every member has an opinion about how things should work, and you can either jump in or not. Your call, bestie! The Internet has no president, no chief operating officer, and no Pope 🙈. The networks that make it up might have presidents and CEOs, but that's a different tea ☕. There's no single authority figure for the Internet as a whole.

The ultimate authority for where the Internet is headed belongs to the Internet Society, or ISOC 🌸. ISOC is a voluntary membership organization, and its whole purpose is promoting global information exchange through Internet technology. (Want more info, or wanna join? Check the contact details in the "For More Information" section near the end of this doc 🦋.) ISOC appoints a council of elders, and that council is responsible for the technical management and direction of the Internet.

The council of elders is a group of invited volunteers called the Internet Architecture Board, or the IAB 🧚. The IAB meets regularly to "bless" standards and allocate resources, like addresses. The Internet works because computers and software applications have standard ways to talk to each other, so computers from different vendors can communicate without drama 🫶. It's not an IBM-only or Sun-only or Macintosh-only network, periodt 💅. The IAB is responsible for these standards. It decides when a standard is necessary and what the standard should be. When a standard is required, it considers the problem, adopts a standard, and announces it via the network. (You were expecting stone tablets? 🙈) The IAB also keeps track of various numbers (and other things) that must remain unique. For example, each computer on the Internet has a unique 32-bit address, and no other computer has the same address. How does this address get assigned? The IAB worries about these kinds of problems 😭. It doesn't actually assign the addresses, but it makes the rules about how to assign them.

As in a church, everyone has opinions about how things ought to run 💜. Internet users express their opinions through meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 🌈. The IETF is another volunteer organization, and it meets regularly to discuss operational and near-term technical problems of the Internet. When it thinks a problem is important enough to merit concern, the IETF sets up a "working group" for further investigation. (In practice, "important enough" usually means there are enough people willing to volunteer for the working group 🙃.) Anyone can attend IETF meetings and be on working groups. What matters is that they actually work ✨. Working groups have lots of different jobs, from producing documentation, to deciding how networks should cooperate when problems occur, to changing the meaning of the bits in some kind of packet. A working group usually produces a report. Depending on the kind of recommendation, it could just be documentation that's made available to anyone who wants it. It could be accepted voluntarily as a good idea that people follow. Or it could be sent to the IAB to be declared a standard 🎀.

If you go to a church and accept its teachings and philosophy, you're accepted by it and get the benefits 🍓. If you don't like it, you can leave. The church is still there, but you get none of the benefits. Such is the Internet 💀. If a network accepts the teachings of the Internet, is connected to it, and considers itself part of it, then it is part of the Internet. It'll find things it doesn't like, and it can address those concerns through the IETF. Some concerns may be considered valid, and the Internet may change accordingly. Some of the changes may run counter to the religion and get rejected. If the network does something that causes damage to the Internet, it could be excommunicated until it mends its evil ways 😤.

Yes, networks can actually get excommunicated. Don't be that network 💀.

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Who Pays for It? 💸

The old rule for when things get confusing is "follow the money." Well, this won't help you understand the Internet 🙃. No one pays for "it." There's no Internet, Inc. that collects fees from all Internet networks or users. Instead, everyone pays for their own part 🌷. The NSF pays for NSFNET. NASA pays for the NASA Science Internet. Networks get together, decide how to connect themselves, and fund these interconnections 🤝. A college or corporation pays for their connection to some regional network, which in turn pays a national provider for its access.

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What Does This Mean for Me? 🦋

The idea that the Internet isn't a network but a collection of networks basically means nothing to the end user 🌸. You want to do something useful: run a program, or access some unique data. You shouldn't have to worry about how it's all stuck together. Think about the telephone system, because it's an internet too 📞. Pacific Bell, AT&T, MCI, British Telephony, Telefonos de Mexico, and so on are all separate corporations that run pieces of the telephone system. They worry about making it all work together. All you have to do is dial 💅.

If you ignore cost and commercials, you shouldn't care whether you're dealing with MCI, AT&T, or Sprint. Dial the number and it works ✨.

You only care who carries your calls when something goes wrong 🚨. If something goes out of service, only one of those companies can fix it. They talk to each other about problems, but each phone carrier is responsible for fixing problems on its own part of the system. The same is true on the Internet. Each network has its own network operations center (NOC) 🖥️. The operation centers talk to each other and know how to resolve problems. Your site has a contract with one of the Internet's constituent networks, and its job is to keep your site happy 🥰. So if something goes wrong, they're the ones to gripe at. If it's not their problem, they'll pass it along.

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What Does the Future Hold? 🔮

Finally, a question I can answer 🙌. It's not that I have a crystal ball (if I did, I'd be on Wall Street instead of writing a book 💰). Rather, these are the things the IAB and the IETF discuss at their meetings. Most people don't care about the long discussions. They only want to know how they'll be affected. So, here are the highlights of the networking future ✨.

New Standard Protocols 📜

Remember when I was talking about how the Internet started and I mentioned the International Standards Organization (ISO) and their set of protocol standards? Well, they finally finished designing it 🎉. Now it's an international standard, typically referred to as the ISO/OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) protocol suite. Many of the Internet's component networks allow use of OSI today. There isn't much demand yet. The U.S. government has taken a position that government computers should be able to speak these protocols. Many places have the software, but few are using it now 🤷.

It's really unclear how much demand there will be for OSI, even with the government backing 🤔. Many people feel the current approach isn't broke, so why fix it? They're just getting comfortable with what they have. Why should they have to learn a new set of commands and terminology just because it's the standard 😩?

Currently there are no real advantages to moving to OSI. It's more complex and less mature than IP, and hence it doesn't work as efficiently. OSI does offer hope of some additional features, but it also suffers from some of the same problems that will plague IP as the network gets much bigger and faster. It's clear that some sites will convert to the OSI protocols over the next few years 🔜. The question is: how many? 🤨

International Connections 🌍

The Internet has been an international network for a long time, but it only reached the United States' allies and overseas military bases 🎖️. Now, with a less paranoid world environment, the Internet is spreading everywhere. It's currently in over 50 countries, and the number is rapidly increasing 📈. Eastern European countries longing for western scientific ties have wanted to participate for a long time, but government regulation kept them out. That ban has been relaxed 🕊️. Third world countries that formerly didn't have the means to participate now view the Internet as a way to raise their education and technology levels 🎓.

In Europe, the development of the Internet used to be hampered by national policies that mandated OSI protocols and regarded IP as a cultural threat akin to EuroDisney 🏰. These policies prevented the development of large-scale Internet infrastructures, except in the Scandinavian countries, which embraced the Internet protocols long ago and are already well-connected. In 1989, RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeens) began coordinating the operation of the Internet in Europe, and presently about 25% of all hosts connected to the Internet are located in Europe 🌟.

At present, the Internet's international expansion is hampered by the lack of a good supporting infrastructure, namely a decent telephone system 📞😤. In both Eastern Europe and the third world, a state-of-the-art phone system is nonexistent. Even in major cities, connections are limited to the speeds available to the average home anywhere in the U.S., 9600 bits/second. Typically, even if one of these countries is "on the Internet," only a few sites are accessible. Usually, this is the major technical university for that country. However, as phone systems improve, you can expect this to change too. More and more, you'll see smaller sites (even individual home systems) connecting to the Internet 🏠✨.

Commercialization 💼

Many big corporations have been on the Internet for years. For the most part, their participation has been limited to their research and engineering departments. The same corporations used some other network (usually a private network) for their business communications. After all, this IP stuff was only an academic toy 🙄. The IBM mainframes that handled their commercial data processing did the "real" networking, using a protocol suite called System Network Architecture (SNA) 🖥️.

Businesses are now discovering that running multiple networks is expensive 💸. Some are beginning to look to the Internet for "one-stop" network shopping 🛍️. They were scared away in the past by policies which excluded or restricted commercial use. Many of these policies are under review and will change. As these restrictions drop, commercial use of the Internet will become progressively more common 📈.

This should be especially good for small businesses. Motorola or Standard Oil can afford to run nationwide networks connecting their sites, but Ace Custom Software couldn't. If Ace has a San Jose office and a Washington office, all it needs is an Internet connection on each end. For all practical purposes, they have a nationwide corporate network, just like the big boys 💅👑.

Privatization ✨

Okay so right behind commercialization comes privatization 💅. For years, the networking community has been begging the telephone companies and other for-profit ventures to offer "off the shelf" IP connections 🙏. It's like how you can order a telephone jack for your house, the installer leaves, and you plug your phone in. You'd order an Internet connection the same way: the installer leaves, and you plug your computer into the Internet ✨. Simple, right? Except nobody really took the bait 🙃. Except for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the company that ran the ARPAnet, there weren't any takers. The telephone companies were basically like, "We'll sell you phone lines, and you can do whatever you like with them." So by default, the Federal government stayed in the networking business 🏛️.

Now that big corporations are obsessed with the Internet, the phone companies are suddenly changing their whole attitude 😭🔥. Now they and other profit-oriented network sellers are complaining that the government ought to get out of the network business. Like, who could possibly provide network services better than the "phone companies"? 🙄 They've got the ear of a lot of political people, who think it sounds reasonable. If you chat with phone company staff, lots of them still don't really get what the Internet is about 💀. They ain't got religion, but they are studying the Bible furiously 📖. (Apologies to those telephone company employees who saw the light years ago and have been trying to drag their employers into church 🙏🎀.)

Okay, most people in the networking community think privatization is a good idea 🙌, but there are some obstacles in the way 🚧. Most of them revolve around the funding for the connections that are already in place 💸. Many schools are connected because the government pays part of the bill 🏫. If they had to pay their own way, some schools would probably decide to spend their money somewhere else 😬. Major research institutions would certainly stay on the net, but some smaller colleges might not, and the costs would probably be prohibitive for most secondary schools (let alone grade schools) 📚. What if a school could afford either an Internet connection or a science lab? It's unclear which one would get funded 🧪. The Internet has not yet become a "necessity" in many people's minds 🤷‍♀️. When it does, expect privatization to come quickly ⚡.

Anyway, enough questions about the history of the information highway system 🛣️. It's time to walk to the edge of the road, try and hitch a ride, and be on your way 🧳🦋.

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Acknowledgments 🎀

Huge thank-you to O'Reilly & Associates, who gave permission to reprint the chapter from Ed Krol's book (1992), "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog." 🫶

For More Information 📚

Okay bestie, here are the reads if you want more 🤓:

• Hoffman, E. and L. Jackson. (1993) "FYI on Introducing the Internet --A Short Bibliography of Introductory Internetworking Readings for the Network Novice," 4 p. (FYI 19, RFC 1463).
  • To find out how to get this document and other on-line introductory readings, send an e-mail message to nis-info@nis.merit.edu, with the following text: send access.guide.
• Krol, Ed. (1992) The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, CA. ISBN 1-56592-025-2.
• Quarterman, J. (1993) "Recent Internet Books," 15 p. (RFC 1432).

And here's how to reach The Internet Society 📞💌:

The Internet Society
Phone: (703) 620-8990
Fax: (703) 620-0913
E-mail: isoc@cnri.reston.va.us

Security Considerations 🔒

Security issues are not discussed in this memo. 🙈 Spoiler: security is a whole other storyline, and this RFC just isn't the one telling it.

Heads up, bestie: this memo leaves security alone completely, so don't go looking for it here 👀.

Authors' Addresses 💌

Meet the two icons behind this RFC 👯‍♀️:

Ed Krol
Computing and Communications Service Office
Univ. of Illinois Urbana Champaign (UIUC)
1304 W Springfield
Urbana, IL 61801

Phone: (217)333-7886
EMail: e-krol@uiuc.edu


Ellen Hoffman
Merit Network, Inc.
2901 Hubbard, Pod-G
Ann Arbor, MI 48105

Phone: (313) 936-3000
EMail: ellen@merit.edu

That's a wrap, babes 🌈💖✨