Data collection in the realm of human activity has been around for thousands of years, since early Sumerian clay tablet records of food crops and taxes. Much later, in 1640s London, a man named John Graunt started collecting data regarding deaths in the city; number of deaths, age groups, and causes. His work was a forerunner of public health statistics and data analysis.
During the 1880s a man named Herman Hollerith noticed a train conductor punching a ticket for a rider and got the idea for a tabulating machine using punch cards (what a brain). Within the same year, Hollerith helped the U.S. government complete the National Census with his machine.
In 1928, German engineer Fritz Pfleumer got a patent on magnetic tape that he used to replace wire recording for storing data. Storing information on magnetic tapes inspired the invention of floppy disks and hard-disk drives later on. In the 1960s computer scientist Edgar Codd introduced the idea of a relational database management system that can describe data attributes in columns and their values in rows: which we know today as a “data table”.
Journey to the Internet
Development of the technology and transmission protocols that make up the internet did not happen overnight. It took decades and a significant number of people who brought together the diversity of talents and breakthroughs that give us the overwhelming connectedness we have today.
My own experience, in 1990, with a Commodore 64 keypad and a large TV screen, sent me from 25 years as a legally blind woodworker to the completion of a long overdue university education. School libraries were just beginning to be digitized and remarkable resources like LexisNexis were coming on line. I am deeply grateful for the technology that opened up the world for me.
The first known description of social interactions that could be enabled through networking were memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962. Here he discussed his “Galactic Network” concept, a globally interconnected set of computers through which one could quickly access data and programs from any site. The concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of computer research at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), starting in October 1962.
In 1961 an MIT student scientist named Leonard Kleinrock published the first paper on “packet switching” theory, a means of transmitting data in packets of information over a digital network rather than the much slower bit by bit transmission requiring a constant circuit connection.
The next step was to make the computers talk together. In 1965, Larry Roberts and Thomas Merrill connected two computers, one in Massachusetts and one in California, with a low speed dial-up telephone line, creating the first wide-area computer network ever built. This experiment showed that the computers could work well together, but that the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate. The need for packet switching was confirmed.
In 1968, Larry Roberts and the DARPA refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET. By the end of 1969, four host computers were connected (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Sant Barbara, and University of Utah) together into the ARPANET, and the budding Internet was born.
The developmental changes that happened during the 1970s were so numerous that a detailed listing would exceed my purposes here. Most notable was the collaboration between two men whose accomplishment would ultimately earn them the title “Fathers of the Internet.” Vinton Cerf, a programmer from UCLA., and Robert Kahn, an electrical engineer from Princeton came up with a system for computer communication that was far more efficient than that being used on the ARPANET. Cerf/Kahn developed a more reliable architecture, still using packets (postcards), which became known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol slash Internet Protocol). Computers constructed with different hardware schemes could suddenly communicate quickly and reliably. TCP/IP worked so well that all these years later it is still used to power the internet. Both Presidents Bush 2 and Bill Clinton awarded medals to these men for their contribution.
Expansion and use of personal computers was facilitated by such inventions as the Ethernet (Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC in 1973) making computer to computer connections within the same building possible, which facilitated LANs (Local Area Networks). Then came the Domain Name System (DNS), which was invented by Paul Mockapetris of USC/Information Science Institute. This made rapidly expanding need for addressing and classification of host names possible.
The wide spread use of TCP/IP created the possibility for a gradual evolution into a more wide spread use of personal PCs. Then, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research). The web was originally intended to meet the need for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world. Then, with the introduction of Google (formally BackRub) in 1997, data became even more widely available to everyone.
So, there now, I’m going to take a long device-less walk in the woods, enjoy the luxurious drudgery of hand writing a letter and engage in the excitement of a complex, time consuming face to face conversation.
© Rabon Saip 2026