History of Research Networking

The history of research networking is a surprisingly short one. Although automatic telecommunications networks have been around for more than a century and computers have been available for nearly fifty years, serious attempts to combine the two technologies only really started in the mid 1970s. Research networking is primarily concerned with the linking of computers and communications. Initiatives of research networkers both in Europe and North America in this period were fundamental for the creation of the data networking environment that we take for granted today. The development, service and commercial cultures of the computer industry and the telecommunications industry have always been quite different. Research networking has bridged and continues to bridge the gap between them.

The first research networks in Europe started to emerge as national initiatives. They concentrated on connecting major university and research sites together. The transmission speeds then were, by today’s standards, remarkably low. The telecommunications networks which were used at that time were starting to make the transition from analogue to digital technology. They were entirely optimised for voice telephony, which was the dominant traffic type. In Europe, the telecommunications industry was organised around a set of national monopoly organisations, typically combined with national postal organisations, who had absolute monopolies of nearly all aspects of service provision. This  frequently included even “in building” wiring. These monopolies were technically conservative, lacked innovative forces and typically viewed data communications with considerable suspicion. They saw data as a service that computer companies, especially in those days IBM, would use to try and undermine their lucrative equipment and service monopolies.  A broadly similar picture could be observed in the USA. In the USA however, the monopolies were more limited. Government sponsored “Computer Inquiries” which addressed the issues of computer communications led, in 1982, to the break up of the nation-wide Bell system and to the emergence of a more competitive national market.

International telecommunications remained a jealously guarded monopoly world-wide. International voice services, with their complex bilateral transfer charging arrangements between sovereign national operators, represented a major “cash cow” which governments were reluctant to kill. This was a particular problem in Europe as the set of national markets were, individually, much smaller than the US market. The introduction of digital switches and digital transmission in telecommunications during the 1980s, replacing mechanical switches and analogue transmission technology, meant that the basic technology of the telecommunications industry became much more suitable for data communications. Access to this technology was, however, limited internationally as it would enable alternative network providers to bypass the transfer pricing regimes for international voice services that were so profitable for the monopoly operators. Again, this was a particular problem in Europe. Mainly as a consequence of this, the development of international research networking In Europe lagged seriously behind national initiatives, especially those in the United States.