Basic Network Provision and the Development of New Services

One of the main aims of the new national X.25 network was to provide a standardised communications infrastructure that would support the needs of the organisations that

74

The figure shows the NOC at the SWURCC in Bath. This NOC connected institutions at 5 sites: one in Exeter, two in Cardiff, one in Bristol and one in Bath. The NOC also connected to the JANET backbone, part of which is illustrated. At each site, terminals connected to the local mainframes on campus, which in turn connected to the SWURCC and JANET. The figure shows an example terminal and mainframe at Exeter and an ICL 2980 at SWURCC in Bath.

Key

1. Exeter University

2. UWIST and UCC in Cardiff 3. Bristol University

4. Bath University

5. NOC at SWURCC in Bath 6. RAL

Major node Minor node

used the network.75 Throughout the 1970s, the issue of resource sharing had been one of the principal reasons for the development of the regional networks. With the evolution of electronic messaging into electronic mail during the early 1970s on the ARPANET, new applications joined the traditional services such as remote job submission and file transfer. The development of these new services was often user- driven, which left the funding bodies with the task of providing the network and its associated services. These included a Name Registration Scheme (NRS), for domain name information, and an e-mail service.76 The Joint Network Team developed the JNT Mail protocol during the early 1980s, in response to a need for an e-mail service that the Network Management Committee had identified in its 1981 report. In line with its general commitment to standards, the JNT designed the new protocol using two existing standards: the ARPANET e-mail header format and the Blue Book file transfer protocol. Since the emergence of e-mail on the ARPANET during the early 1970s, US computer scientists had collaborated on protocols for electronic mail which the ARPANET community had subsequently adopted.77 By the early 1980s, the e- mail protocols had existed for years and had demonstrated their effectiveness on the network. The Joint Network Team decided to use one of these standards, the ARPANET e-mail header format, to form the basis for its new e-mail service.78 The JNT would use the Blue Book file transfer protocol to transmit e-mails formatted by the ARPANET e-mail standard. In 1984, the JNT ratified this combination of protocols on JANET, referring to the new standard as the Grey Book protocol.79

Apart from services such as the Name Registration Scheme and e-mail, the Network Executive did not provide any additional services, leaving the users to develop the facilities they required. User exploration and development would increase the value of the network for the community as a whole.80 Two examples of early services that users developed were a Usenet gateway and access to Online Public Access

75

I.L. Smith, “Joint Academic Network (JANET),” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, vol. 16, no. 1 and 2, 1988, pp. 101-105.

76

See Appendix J.

77

P.H. Salus, Casting the Net: From ARPANET to Internet and Beyond (Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley, 1995), pp. 95-98. 78 See Appendix L. 79 Ibid. 80

On co-invention see T. Bresnahan and S. Greenstein, “Technical Progress and Co-invention in Computing and in the Uses of Computers,” Brookings Papers on Economics Activity: Microeconomics, vol. 1996, 1996, pp. 1-77.

Catalogues (OPACs). To connect to the ARPANET during the 1970s, researchers officially needed to be involved in US Department of Defense (DoD) research and their institutions needed to have the necessary funds to cover the costs of the connections. These constraints excluded others at universities who wanted to access computer networks. In 1979, two graduates at Duke University proposed a network to link UNIX computers together. Called Usenet, it provided people with an alternative to the ARPANET, enabling them to post messages to newsgroups, and send and receive e-mails. Known as the ‘poor man’s ARPANET’, Usenet quickly grew into a worldwide system of thousands of newsgroups covering many subjects.81 In 1985, the University of Kent at Canterbury joined this growing community by launching a gateway on JANET, to provide access to Usenet for users of the academic network.82 The university charged sites £30 a month for access to Usenet’s newsgroups, and many institutions used the gateway. Another service that people added to the national academic network were online catalogues. In 1984, three libraries in Birmingham launched an OPAC.83 This catalogue provided basic search facilities at Birmingham Polytechnic and was one of the first networked catalogues in the UK. Other university libraries, such as Cambridge and Surrey, followed this development with their own online catalogues which people could access using JANET. Using simple phrase and keyword search facilities, these systems provided access to library catalogues over the network.84 The catalogues contained varying amounts of information, from an incomplete set of monographs at the University of East Anglia, to a complete catalogue of over 540,000 titles at Hull University. The library community prompted the development of online catalogues on JANET, and other user-driven initiatives began to mirror these developments. As different communities of users began to develop and then use a range of services, they perceived JANET as a network that satisfied different needs.85 To some it was a way to access library catalogues, to others it was a way to transfer files. Some used the facilities to access information on networks such as Usenet. Others used it to communicate.

81

See Appendix I.

82

P. Collinson, “The Usenet Gateway at the University of Kent,” Alvey News, October 1986, pp. 14-17.

83

W. Foster and R. Wellings, “Development of BLCMP’s Online Public Access Catalogue,” Program, vol. 23, no. 2, 1989, pp. 151-162.

84

W. Zimin, A Comparative Study of OPACS on JANET, M.Sc. thesis (Loughborough: Department of Library and Information Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, 1987), pp. 6-13.

85

On interpretive flexibility see W.E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 73-74.