Today’s Observer column
The design of Arpanet’s successor, the internet we use today, started in the early 1970s and it was first switched on in January 1983.
The designers of the network were, from the outset, determined to avoid the limitations of earlier communication systems, particularly the analogue telephone network, which was optimised for voice, hopeless for digital signals and owned by corporations which resisted innovations that they themselves had not originated. So the new network would not have an owner or be optimised for any particular medium, and would therefore be more permissive than any earlier network. Anyone could access it, and create services that ran upon it, so long as their computers conformed to the protocols of the network.
The result was the explosion of creativity – good and bad – that we are still living with today. What the internet’s designers had built was what a scholar later called “an architecture for permissionless innovation”; or, put another way, a global platform for springing surprises.
The world wide web, created by Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980s, was one of those surprises. But so too was something called VoIP (voice over internet protocol)…