THE INTERNET

Arpanet

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (Arpanet) was developed to ensure that communication could be maintained between North America and Europe in the event of a nuclear war disrupting radio communications. However, the Conservative government rejected a proposal that Britain should be connected to it via Norway. This was because the government was seeking to take Britain into the European Economic Community and therefore was wary of perceived of being. Professor Peter Kirstein (n Kirschstein) of University College's Institute of Computer Science was supportive of the scheme. He redressed it as an academic project and secured the backing of both the National Physical Laboratory and the Post Office. In 1976 the academic assigned the queen her own e-mail address. He championed the T.C.P./I.P. protocol which enabled information to be shared across different computer networks.

Location: University College, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT (purple, red)

Julian Assange

In 2012 the Swedish authorities sought to place Julian Assange on trial for alleged sexual offences that were alleged to have occurred in 2010. He took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in Knightsbridge.

Some of the charges against Assange expired three years later under the five-year Sweden's statute of limitations. In 2017 the Swedes indicated that they were no longer pursuing the matter. One of the cases was pursuable until 2020.

In 2018 it was reported Assange was launching a legal action against the Ecuadorean Embassy for violating his freedoms . The following year the Ecuadorean government agreed to his removal from the building. There were news reports that his behaviour had become profoundly anti-social.

In 2022 the Supreme Court refused Assange permission to challenge his extradition to the United States.

Location: Ecuadorean Embassy, 3 Hans Crescent, SW1X 0LS (purple, yellow)

H.M.P. Belmarsh, Western Way, Thamesmead, SE28 0EB

The Godfather of Broadband

In 1870 John Tyndall observed that a flow of water could channel sunlight. The phenomenon of total internal reflection laid the basis for optical glass fibre optics which in turn made broadband computing networks.

Sir Charles Kao (1933-2018) was born in Shanghai and grew up in Hong Kong. He received a B.Sc. from Woolwich Polytechnic and was awarded a Ph.D. by Imperial College in 1965. He then went to work for Standard Telecommunications Laboratories at Harlow in Essex. Within a year he believed that fused silica could be used to make ultrapure optical glass fibre cables to service increasing telephone traffic. Initially, his proposal was meant with degree of scepticism within the company; upon first hearing of the idea his wife and colleague Gwen told him to pull the other leg . With George Hockham he articulated his insight in the paper Dielectric-fibre surface waveguides for optical frequencies. In 1970 the American glass manufacturer Corning had produced a usable fibre. Successively improved ones were manufactured. The first transoceanic cable was laid in 1988. Kao became known as the godfather of broadband . In 1997 he was elected a F.R.S.. In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. The following year he was knighted.

Location: Imperial College Road, SW7 2AZ (purple, red)

The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax

In 2015 Ella Draper was involved in a custody dispute the father of her two children. She posted a video on the Internet that accused teachers and parents at a local school of engaging in paedophilic, satanic rituals. Here then boyfriend, Abraham Christie was a convicted criminal was associated with conspiracy theorists. Sabine McNeil dubbed herself Draper's legal adviser .

Hundreds of thousands of instances of harassment were made against the parents, including a number of death threats.

McNeil was convicted of harassment. She was given a nine-year prison sentence, of which she served four.

Packets

Donald Davies's mother had worked in a telephone exchange. While he had been a teenager, she had brought him back technical manuals that he had read closely thereby developing a good knowledge of telephone systems. He was able to combine this with his knowledge of queueing theory, an established field of mathematics. He appreciated that there would be greater fluidity in the system if the items that were using were smaller. This led to the idea of packets. He started to promote it. In Britain it was not taken up.

Paul Baron of the Rand Corporation had come to a similar conclusion but also found the powers-that-be were unresponsive to his insight. The American defence agency A.R.P.A. had numerous computers at its different sites that people had tailored to their needs. When new people joined the agency, they were asked whether they might have the same programs on their computers but were told they would have to program them themselves. The body decided it needed a way of linking the computers in a practicable way that was more flexible that the single machine to single connection that was then available. It heard of Davies and invited him to tell it more of his idea. He did so, also informing its staff of the existence of Baron. Arpanet followed and ultimately the Internet.

In the late 1960s the Laboratory started operating its own on-site data network. The U.K. finally established its in 1981.

Location: Hampton Road, Teddington, TW11 0LW

Website: www.npl.co.uk

Transaction Coase

As a University of London external student, Ronald Coase (1910-2013) started a chemistry degree. However, he founded that the course's mathematical element was not to his taste. He switched to studying commerce. As a student at the London School of Economics, he noticed that while economics addressed economies it had a minimal appreciation of the role that firms played within them. He noted that the car industry had come to be dominated by a handful of major manufacturers. Academic economics had virtually no interest in business people s decision-making processes. He was also aware that in the West the central planning that the Soviet Union was universally regarded as being fundamentally flawed, yet Ford used central planning. Companies internal processes were clearly not determined by price mechanisms. The youth was awarded a travel scholarship. He used it to spend a year studying companies in the United States. He paid particular attention to the automotive industry.

Coase realised that there were costs involved in using the pricing mechanism: negotiations had to be made, claims had to be verified, people had to be hired, materials had to be sourced, procedures had to be put in place, disagreements had to be resolved, etc.. He dubbed them transaction costs. He realised that for all their flaws and expense they might often be regarded as being preferable to dependence upon the pricing mechanism.

Coase s insights explained why firms are structured the way they are and how and why they change in response to circumstances. The desire to reduce transaction costs is one of the reasons why companies tend to become vertically integrated as they become larger. The idea explained why companies tend to achieve particular sizes and shapes. These are determined in large part by whether or not transaction costs were retained within a business. He argued that companies were inclined to grow larger in size as a response to technological changes that reduced their costs of doing business.

In 1932 Coase as a 21-year-old set out his argument in a lecture. Five years later he published the material as an article that was entitled The Nature of The Firm. This was largely ignored for next 50 years. The importance of Coase s insights entered the mainstream when the growth of Internet companies needed to be understood by economists. It was appreciated that their transaction costs were far lower than those of traditional businesses. Internet businesses tended to contract out activities on the basis of cost-effectiveness.

Coase was always to be of the view that economists were too prone to theorising and indulging in flawed abstractions. He moved to the United States in 1951. He spent most of his professional life there teaching at the University of Chicago. In 1991 he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Location: Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE (blue, brown)

Website: www.coase.org (The Ronald Coase Institute)

Twitter

Twitter was launched in 2009.

In 2013 there was a campaign to have an image of Jane Austen placed upon the 10 note which was going to be redesigned. Twitter was a means by which Internet trolls threatened the campaigners with rape and murder.

What Was It Like?

As it was becoming apparent that the Internet was going to have a major impact upon the world, the Cabinet of Gordon Brown's Labour government invited Tim Berners-Lee to address it. Upon meeting the programmer Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, exclaimed, Tim Berners Lee! It's like meeting the man who invented the wheel! What was that like? came the reply.

Location: 10 Downing Street, SW1A 2AA (orange, red)

David Backhouse 2024