The UK has been involved in the research and development of
packet switching,
communication protocols, and
internetworking since their origins. The development of these technologies was international from the beginning. While the research and development that led to the
Internet protocol suite (and the early infrastructure and governance of the Internet) was driven and funded by the United States, it also involved and applied the work of British (and French) researchers. In particular,
Donald Davies independently invented and pioneered the implementation of packet switching and associated communication protocols and
computer network design at the
National Physical Laboratory starting in 1965, which was incorporated into the design of the
ARPANET in the United States; internetworking was pioneered by
Peter Kirstein at
University College London (UCL) beginning in 1973 and he and his team at UCL participated in the
Internet Experiment Notes (IEN) work to design
TCP/IP (which incorporated new concepts for internetworking developed by
Louis Pouzin in France around the same time); and
Tim Berners-Lee invented the
World Wide Web in 1989 while working at
CERN in Switzerland.
Precursors Britain pioneered research and development of
computers in the 1940s. This led to partnerships between the public and private sectors, which brought about sharing of concepts and the transfer of personnel between industry and academia or national research bodies. The
trackball was invented in 1946 by
Ralph Benjamin, while working for the Royal Navy Scientific Service. At the
National Physical Laboratory (NPL),
Alan Turing worked on computer design, assisted by
Donald Davies in 1947.
Christopher Strachey, who became
Oxford University's first professor of computation, filed a patent application for
time-sharing in 1959. In June that year, he gave a paper "Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers" at the
UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris where he passed the concept on to
J. C. R. Licklider who worked on
Project MAC at MIT in the United States.
Packet switching and national data network proposal After meeting with Licklider in 1965, Donald Davies conceived the idea of
packet switching for
data communication. He proposed a commercial national data network and developed plans to implement the concept in a local area network, the
NPL network, which operated from 1969 to 1986. He and his team including Derek Barber and
Roger Scantlebury developed the concept of
communication protocols for the network and carried out work to simulate the performance of a wide-area packet-switched network capable of providing data communications facilities to most of the U.K. Following the inaugural
Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967, their research and practice was adopted by the
ARPANET in the United States and influenced other researchers in Europe, including
Louis Pouzin, and in Japan.
The early Internet and TCP/IP Donald Davies, Derek Barber and Roger Scantlebury joined the
International Network Working Group (INWG) in 1972 along with researchers from the United States and France.
Vint Cerf and
Bob Kahn acknowledged Davies and Scantlebury in their seminal 1974 paper "
A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication".
Peter Kirstein's research group at
University College London (UCL) was one of only two international connections on the ARPANET, alongside Norway (
NORSAR and
NDRE). Beginning in 1973, UCL provided a gateway between the ARPANET and British academic networks, the first international
internetwork for computer
resource sharing. In 1975, 40
British academic research groups were using the link; by 1984, there was a user population of about 150 people on both sides of the Atlantic. The following year, testing began with concurrent implementations at University College London, Stanford University, and
BBN. UCL played a significant role in the very earliest work recorded in the IEN.
Adrian Stokes and
Sylvia Wilbur, among others at UCL, programmed the computer used as the local
node for the network at UCL and were "probably one of the first people in this country ever to send an email, back in 1974". Kirstein co-authored with Vint Cerf one of the most significant early technical papers on the
internetworking concept in 1978. Further work was done by researchers at the
Information Sciences Institute (ISI), at the
University of Southern California. Kirstein's research group at UCL adopted
TCP/IP in November 1982, ahead of ARPANET. The
Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) became involved in implementation and testing of TCP/IP in 1976. The first
email sent by a
head of state was sent from the RSRE by Queen
Elizabeth II to inaugurate the link to the ARPANET in March that year. RSRE was allocated
class A Internet address range 25 in 1979, which later became the
Ministry of Defence address space, providing 16.7 million
IPv4 addresses. Roger Camrass, with his supervisor,
Robert Gallager, at MIT, showed packet switching to be optimal in the
Huffman coding sense in 1978. Derek Barber was involved in Internet design discussions in 1980. British researchers expressed a desire to use a country designation when American researchers
Jon Postel and
Paul Mockapetris were designing the
Domain Name System in 1984. Postel adopted this idea for the DNS, which used the ISO standard country abbreviations except for following the "UK" convention already in use in the UK's
Name Registration Scheme, rather than the ISO-standard "GB". The
.uk Internet
country code top-level domain (ccTLD) was registered in July 1985, seven months after the original
generic top-level domains such as
.com and the first country code after
.us. At the time, ccTLDs were delegated by Postel to a "responsible person" and Andrew McDowell at UCL managed .uk, the first country code delegation. He later passed it to Dr Willie Black at the UK Education and Research Networking Association (UK ERNA). Black managed the "Naming Committee" until he and John Carey formed
Nominet UK in 1996. As one of the first professional ccTLD operators, it became the model for many other operators worldwide. The UK's
national research and education network (NREN),
JANET connected with the
National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) in the United States in 1989. JANET adopted
Internet Protocol on its existing network in 1991. In the same year, Dai Davies introduced Internet technology into the pan-European NREN,
EuropaNet.
British Telecom (BT) operated research labs which began, unofficially, relaying its internal email to the Internet at the end of the 1980s.
NetNames,
Ivan Pope's company, developed the concept of a standalone commercial
domain name registrar, which would sell domain registration and other associated services to the public.
Network Solutions Inc. (NSI), the
domain name registry for the
.com,
.net, and
.org top-level domains (TLDs), assimilated this model, which ultimately led to the separation of registry and registrar functions.
Jon Crowcroft and
Mark Handley received multiple awards for their work on Internet technology in the 1990s and 2000s.
Karen Banks promoted the use of the Internet to empower women around the world. Over the period 1980 to 2000, BT and other providers adopted TCP/IP and Internet product strategies when it became commercially advantageous.
Other computer networks and protocols The South West Universities Computer Network (SWUCN) was an early British academic computer network developed with the objective of resource sharing. After planning began in 1967, work was initiated in 1969 on an experimental network, becoming operational for users in 1974. In the early 1970s, the
Science Research Council community established SRCnet, later called SERCnet.
Other regional academic networks were built in the mid-late 1970s, as well as experimental networks such as the
Cambridge Ring. During the 1970s, the NPL team researched
internetworking on the
European Informatics Network (EIN). Based on
datagrams, the network linked
Euratom, the French research centre
INRIA and the UK's
National Physical Laboratory in 1976. The transport protocol of the EIN helped to launch the
INWG and
X.25 protocols. Building on the work of
James H. Ellis in the late 1960s,
Clifford Cocks and
Malcolm Williamson invented a
public-key cryptography algorithm in 1973. An equivalent algorithm was later independently invented in 1977 in the United States by
Ron Rivest,
Adi Shamir and
Leonard Adleman. The
RSA algorithm became central to security on the Internet.
Post Office Telecommunications developed an experimental public packet switching network,
EPSS, in the 1970s. This was one of the first
public data networks in the world when it began operating in 1976. EPSS was replaced with the
Packet Switch Stream (PSS) in 1980. PSS connected to the
International Packet Switched Service (IPSS), which was created in 1978 through a collaboration between Post Office Telecommunications and two US telecoms companies. IPSS provided worldwide networking infrastructure. The UK academic community defined the
Coloured Book protocols, which came into use as "interim" X.25 standards. These protocols gained some acceptance internationally as the first complete X.25 standard, and gave the UK "several years lead over other countries".
Logica, together with the French company SESA, set up a joint venture in 1975 to undertake the
Euronet development, using X.25 protocols to form
virtual circuits. It established a network linking a number of European countries in 1979 before being handed over to national
PTTs In 1984. Peter Collinson brought
Unix to the
University of Kent (UKC/UKnet) in 1976 and set up a
UUCP test service to Bell Labs in the U.S. in 1979. The first UUCP emails from the U.S. arrived in the UK later that year and email to Europe (the Netherlands and Denmark) started in 1980, becoming a regular service via
EUnet in 1982. UKC provided the first connections to non-academic users in the early 1980s. Several companies established electronic mail services in Britain during the 1970s and early 1980s, enabling subscribers to send email either internally within a company network or over telephone connections or data networks such as
Packet Switch Stream. In the early 1980s, British academic networks started a standardisation and interconnection effort based on X.25 and the Coloured Book protocols. Known as the United Kingdom Education and Research Networking Association (UK ERNA), and later JNT Association, this became
JANET, the UK's
national research and education network (NREN). JANET linked all universities, higher education establishments, and publicly funded research laboratories. It began operation in 1984, two years ahead of the
NSFNET in the United States and was the fastest X.25 network in the world. The
National Computing Centre 1976 publication 'Why Distributed Computing' which came from considerable research into future configurations for computer systems, resulted in the UK presenting the case for an international standards committee to cover this area at the ISO meeting in Sydney in March 1977. This international effort ultimately led to the
OSI model as an international reference model, published in 1984. For a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, engineers, organizations and nations became
polarized over the issue of which standard, the OSI model or the Internet protocol suite would result in the best and most robust computer networks. Public dialup information, messaging and e-commerce services, were pioneered through the
Prestel services developed by
Post Office Telecommunications in 1979. Commercial networking services between the UK and the US were being developed in late 1990.
World Wide Web In 1989,
Tim Berners-Lee, working at
CERN in Switzerland, wrote a proposal for "a large hypertext database with typed links". The following year, he specified
HTML, the hypertext language, and
HTTP, the protocol. These concepts became a world-wide information system known as the
World Wide Web (WWW). Operating on the Internet, it allows documents to be created for reading or accessing services with connections to other documents or services, accessed by clicking on hypertext links, enabling the user to navigate from one document or service to another.
Nicola Pellow worked with Berners-Lee and
Robert Cailliau on the WWW project at CERN.
British Telecom began using the WWW in 1991 during a collaborative project called the Oracle Alliance Program. It was founded in 1990 by
Oracle Corporation, based in California, to provide information for its corporate partners and about those partners. BT became involved in May 1991.
File sharing was required as part of the program and, initially, floppy disks were sent through the post. Then in July 1991 access to the Internet was implemented by BT network engineers using the BT packet switching network. A link was established from
Ipswich to London for access to the
Internet backbone. The first file transfers made via a
NeXT-based WWW interface were completed in October 1991. The
BBC registered with the
DDN-NIC in 1989, establishing Internet access via
Brunel University where
bbc.co.uk was registered through
JANET NRS and the BBC's first website went online in 1994. Other
early websites which went online in 1993 hosted in the UK included
JumpStation, which was the first
WWW search engine hosted at the
University of Stirling in Scotland;
The Internet Movie Database, hosted by the computer science department of
Cardiff University in Wales; and Kent Anthropology, one of the first social science sites (one of the first 200 web servers). It began to enter everyday use in 19931994. An early attempt to provide access to the Web on television was being developed in 1995.
Dial-up Internet access Pipex was established in 1990 and began providing
dial-up Internet access in March 1992, the UK's first commercial
Internet service provider (ISP). One of its first customers that year was
Demon Internet, which popularised dial up
modem-based internet access in the UK. By November 1993, Pipex provided Internet service to 150 customer sites.
EUnet GB was founded as a commercial ISP in 1993 by a group of academics. In May 1998, Demon Internet had 180,000 subscribers. BT trialled its first
ISDN 'broadband' connection in 1992. The first commercial service was available from
Telewest in 2000. == Broadband ==