I was reading a book today, called Deploying QoS for Cisco IP and NGN networks, which I can recommend to you for the history and future of QoS in the networking industry, there were couple of paragraphs in the book, which lead me to share my thoughts about the protocols/technologies and their usage.
In the book, as I agree with, it says:
Much of the available Internet history literature suggests that the Internet began with some military computers in the Pentagon in a network called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or Arpanet) in 1969.
One theory is that the network was designed to survive a nuclear attack. This project led to the development of Internet protocols sometime during the 1970s.
In reality, Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official in charge of the Arpanet, suggests that the purpose was not military but scientific. According to Taylor, there was no consideration of surviving a nuclear attack.
In fact, Larry Roberts, who was employed to build the Arpanet, has stated that Arpanet was not even intended to be a communications infrastructure.
The Arpanet was invented to make it possible for research institutions to use the processing power of other institutions’ computers when they had large calculations to do that required more power or when other agencies’ computers were better suited for a given task.
Probably most of you have been believing the purpose of the Internet was to support military communications and that it was designed to survive even under nuclear attack. By the time communications, even commercial purposes were the common usage scenario, it was not obviously the case in the beginning, as the author explains above.
Also, as we know Internet today is a highly distributed system, interconnection of networks or commonly known as the network of networks, it is very natural that it can survive under nuclear attack. In fact, I remember Dyn prepared a report ‘How hard it is to disconnect the country from the Internet, as you will see, most countries today are well connected to other countries via transit to Global Internet.
It may be planned for researchers to share their computer power, but today, the Internet is used by billions of people( still as we know there are 3 billion un-connected though) connected to the Internet and use it for many reasons.
When MPLS was first introduced, it was faster processing of header, so packet transmission would be efficient and performance of the system would increase. Today, MPLS is used mainly for VPNs and a couple of other services of it, almost no one deploys it for faster processing.
When virtualization first came as an idea, it was intended for better utilization of physical server capacity.
Today we move virtual machines from one physical server to another for probably almost every network function as well. (RR, Firewall, BNG, DPI, LB, etc., and not even only networking functions for sure.)
Today we are investigating some cool topics, SDN, IBN (Intent Based Networking), Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Edge Computing, Fog Computing, IoT, etc and I am very happy that hopefully, I will be able to follow where we are today and where we will be in 10, 20 maybe after 30 days.