He never envisioned his 97-year-old mother using it, but 35 years later children and adults are connecting to it worldwide.
Professor Leonard Kleinrock of UCLA’s computer science department is one of the founders of the Internet and, together with the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, celebrated the Internet’s 35th birthday last week with a symposium featuring leaders of the industry.
Members of the audience included over 200 UCLA faculty, students, and computer industry and UCLA foundation members.
Throughout the day, many issues were addressed concerning the Internet. Topics ranged from the role of the Internet in today’s technologically advanced economy to the societal implications of the Internet.
Kleinrock had a vision about the Internet, which he believed would include five components, and its potential uses in the real world.
“I imagined that the network would be everywhere, always on, always available, and anyone would be able to get on any time with any device and that it would be invisible (as wireless connections are) and easy to use,” Kleinrock said.
On Oct. 29, 1969, Kleinrock led a team of engineers to launch the first Internet message from one computer to another.
“There was no record of this event, and there wasn’t even a good message prepared. When it happened we realized it was a great experiment,” he said.
The first message was “lo” since they had been trying to “log in” when the other computer at Stanford University crashed.
UCLA was supposed to write “log” and the computer at Stanford was supposed to write “in” for their first communication.
After stumbling upon this communication, Kleinrock realized that the Internet had a lot of potential.
He had never envisioned that it would become a mass form of communication until 1972, when the major drive of the Internet became e-mail. He said he thought that the Internet would be limited in its scope.
“I imagined great things, but I never envisioned it as people talking to each other, I only saw computers talking to each other,” Kleinrock said.
According to Kleinrock, the Internet had gotten the first three of his envisioned components right. Those three components are for the Internet to always be on, everywhere, and available.
The other field that he is now working on is “nomadicity,” or the ability to connect anywhere with any device to bring cyberspace out into the physical world.
The second issue of cyberspace is the idea that its convenience is locked behind the computer screen. Kleinrock hopes to bring the services of the Internet to the real world where there is a highly interactive system set up.
“For instance, if I walk into a room, the room will know that I walked into it and the response will be customized to me and accommodate me,” he said.
His final hope, which he termed ubiquity, concerns scenarios where people would be able to access the Internet anywhere in the world.
He envisions a vast network with large amounts of data being sent over high speeds and great distances. Since individuals cannot comprehend this, he said there will be intelligent software agents that operate autonomously within the infrastructure.
Kleinrock still sees the Internet in its infancy and believes that current services can be further developed. “It’s very young and many things can still happen, such as e-mail, instant messaging and services, but lots more is going to happen,” he said.
In addition to the experiences and hopes of Kleinrock, the symposium featured discussions by a variety of speakers, including Henry Samueli from Broadcom Corporation, a semiconductor solutions company, Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Media, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Lawrence G. Roberts from Anagran, a company developing an IP router.
One of the moderators, Bran Ferran, from Applied Minds, asked what would be done differently if Kleinrock had the chance to go back. Kleinrock said that he’d make it more flexible. The other founders present at the event talked about their experiences with the beginning of the Internet and what they would have done differently.
Roberts answered that he didn’t think that they had been that far off with their creation, referring to the differences between then and now.
“I don’t think that we did it all that wrong. It would’ve been nice if (authentication) was in, but it was a fight to even get it the way it was,” Roberts said.
In addition, a session regarding the social, economic and political implications of the Internet’s global spread was moderated by Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, according to the engineering press release regarding the symposium.