In parallel with the commercialisation efforts that were highlighted by the Interop activities, the vendors began to attend the IETF meetings that were held 3 or 4 times a year to discuss new ideas for extensions of the TCP/IP protocol suite. Starting with a few hundred attendees mostly from academia and paid for by the government, these meetings now often exceeds a thousand attendees, mostly from the vendor community and paid for by the attendees themselves.
Network management provides an example of the interplay between the research and commercial communities. In the beginning of the Internet, the emphasis was on defining and implementing protocols that achieved interoperation. As the network grew larger, it became clear that the sometime ad hoc procedures used to manage the network would not scale. Manual configuration of tables was replaced by distributed automated algorithms, and better tools were devised to isolate faults. In 1987 it became clear that a protocol was needed that would permit the elements of the network, such as the routers, to be remotely managed in a uniform way. Several protocols for this purpose were proposed, including Simple Network Management Protocol or SNMP (designed, as its name would suggest, for simplicity, and derived from an earlier proposal called SGMP) , HEMS and CMIP. A series of meeting led to the decisions that HEMS would be withdrawn as a candidate for standardization, in order to help resolve the contention, but that work on both SNMP and CMIP would go forward, with the idea that the SNMP could be a more near-term solution and CMIP a longer-term approach. The market could choose the one it found more suitable. SNMP is now used almost universally for network based management.
In the last few years, we have seen a new phase of commercialisation. Originally, commercial efforts mainly comprised vendors providing the basic networking products, and service providers offering the connectivity and basic Internet services. The Internet has now become almost a “commodity” service, and much of the latest attention has been on the use of this global information infrastructure for support of other commercial services. This has been tremendously accelerated by the widespread and rapid adoption of browsers and the World Wide Web technology, allowing users easy access to information linked throughout the globe. Products are available to facilitate the provisioning of that information and many of the latest developments in technology have been aimed at providing increasingly sophisticated information services on top of the basic Internet data communications.
Conclusion
What is the reason for the immense success of the World-Wide Web? The system requirements for running a WWW server are minimal, so even administrators with limited funds had a chance to become information providers. Because of the intuitive nature of hypertext, many inexperienced computer users were able to connect to the network. Furthermore, the simplicity of the HyperText Markup Language, used for creating interactive documents, allowed these users to contribute to the expanding database of documents on the Web. Also, the nature of the World-Wide Web provided a way to interconnect computers running different operating systems, and display information created in a variety of existing media formats.
The possibilities for hypertext in the world-wide environment are endless. With the computer industry growing at today’s pace, no one knows what awaits us at the turn of the 21st century.
Bibliography
+ http://polaris.disa.org/edi/edihome.htp
+ http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.html
+ http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/ietfhis.html
+ http://homepage.seas.upenn.edu/ lzeltser/WWW/