Was L.A. really Internet's ground zero?

Los Angeles is the birthplace of the internet - or so proclaim the ubiquitous banners flying from street lamps throughout the city, which also claim that BBQ chicken pizza, two-piece bathing suits anti assorted other breakthrough were born here.

There's just one problem: L.A. is not the birthplace of the Internet. At least not the only birthplace.

Several other areas around the country, including the Bay Area and Boston, legitimately can make the same claim. The technology that led to today's Internet emerged from many places, many people and many ideas.

"Actually, in my mind, the birthplace of the Internet was Stanford University." said Vinton Cerf. a UCLA computer science doctorate degree holder who is commonly identified as the "Father of the Internet." "That's where we figured out how to link computer networks.

"But if you think that the Internet's birthplace should be considered where it was first invented, then it would be Boston. If you think the Internet was born where the 'ARPAnet' (the Department of Defense's seminal computer network) was implemented, then it would be Los Angeles," added Cerf, who currently works in Washington as senior vice president of Internet architecture and engineering MCI Communications Corp.

It's no mystery why cities are after the bragging rights for a medium that has fundamentally reshaped society in less than five years. E-mail has changed how people correspond. E-commerce has redirected the way companies do business. News now flies across the globe.

No medium has revolutionized the world as quickly as the Internet. To be at the epicenter is to gamer a spot in history.

The cast of characters is worthy of a Greek play. Key scientists have quibbled over nuances of credit for almost two decades, some even smearing each other in the press, and the debate seems destined to continue.

The timeline is generally agreed upon, but be forewarned: The events that led to the Internet's creation are not as tidy as an orderly timeline may suggest. They reflect the national - in some cases international - nature of academic research efforts that have no boundaries, no matter what the marketing types might say.

The concept of a vast computer network sprang up independently on both the East and West coasts in the 1960s - well before anyone had even heard of the personal computer, much less the World Wide Web.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, a Ph.D. candidate named Leonard Kleinrock published the first paper on "packet switching theory," a revolutionary concept about data networking. In 1962, also at MIT, researcher J.C.R. Licklider discussed his "Galactic Network," a theoretical, globally interconnected data system.

Meanwhile, an engineer from Hughes Aircraft Co. was doing similar work in Southern California. Paul Baran had helped design the Minuteman missile in the 1950s at Hughes. Describing himself as "scared stiff" about the implications of his work, Baran decided to quit developing weapons of mass destruction and instead contemplate their ramifications. To pursue that, he joined the Santa Monica think tank Rand Corp. in 1960.

There, Baran conceived of a computer network without a single command center. If one computerized command center were destroyed in a missile strike, the U.S. government's computer system could still function and launch a second strike. He published his work exploring a decentralized computer network in a series of papers from 1962 to 1964.

By 1966, the idea of a computer network had captured the attention of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Larry Roberts, another former MIT researcher who worked at ARPA, began to flesh out the rough concepts coming out of Rand and elsewhere into a blueprint for an actual network of computers.

Two years later, ARPA turned to a private company to transform its blueprint into an actual network, awarding the project to Cambridge. Mass.-based Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc., a consulting company then experimenting with computers.

"ARPA went around asking who could create their specifications," Ceff said. "A team of BBN engineers then did the design work, created the first computer network and worked on the various aspects that shaped what would become the Internet. When they finished their work, the attention shifted from Boston to L.A. in 1969."

ARPA chose UCLA to house the first computer in its fledgling computer network. eponymously called the ARPAnet, because of Kleinrock, who had been teaching at UCLA's engineering department since 1964 and ran a special computer center there. The Cambridge consulting company set up the first ARPA computer at UCLA in September 1969, then set up a second ARPA computer the next month at the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto.

"In October, we had the very, first conversation between computers," said Kleinrock, who still teaches at UCLA. "We connected to the Stanford computer and tried to send it some data. We started by typing the command 'login.' We typed L. which they saw: we typed O, which they saw. Then we typed the G and the system crashed."

ARPA moved quickly to set up two other networked computers by the end of 1969, expanding to the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. The ARPAnet was established.

It is this part of the story that officials of the New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership grabbed onto in proclaiming L.A. as the internet's birthplace.

"We know that there is some controversy around this claim," Jennifer Connelly, marketing director for NewLAMP. "But from the information we found, we were convinced that Professor Kleinrock at UCLA started the Internet."

At this point, the network was very crude. These were the days of the mainframe computer, each one filling a room at a university. Modern connections were tortuously slow. These hurdles made the ARPAnet an even more impressive feat.

Robert Kahn, who had taken a leading role on the project while working at Bolt Beranek & Newman, decided that it was time more people knew about the breakthrough. Without warning his colleagues. Kahn announced a public debut of the network in Washington.

This announcement turned up the heat on the ARPAnet developers to put together a functioning network in a short period of time.

"We were under enormous pressure to get that thing working in time (for the public demonstration)." recalled Cerf, who worked under Kleinrock and with Kahn at UCLA while getting his Ph.D. "It was a rush, but the network was well received."

Within a year of the network's debut, Kahn uncovered a major problem: The computer world was creating its own Tower of Babel. Other methods of sending information between computers had cropped up in Europe, as had different methods for satellite transmissions and radio transmissions. Each language was distinct. The networks couldn't communicate with each other.

Kahn went to Ceff, who was then teaching at Stanford's electrical engineering and computer science departments. They teamed up to find a solution that let all types of data travel along a common network by wrapping them in a standardized "envelope." "Transmission control protocol," or TCP, has been widely heralded as what transformed the ARPAnet into the modern Internet.

"(The development of TCP) is the heart of the Internet, when computer networks can link to other computer networks," Cerf said. "Before this, the ground work had been laid, but this super-network that is the Internet hadn't been possible."

A team of Stanford graduate students then debugged the protocol under Cerf's supervision. By September 1974, the basic computer protocols had been developed for the ARPAnet. The floodgate was unlocked. Networked computers could now communicate freely with each other.

For most of the next decade, the ARPAnet remained the province of academic, research and U.S. military institutions, but it was deviating from its original military research purpose. Computer science students at Duke University and University of North Carolina discovered how to combine the ARPAnet with computer "chat boards," thereby starting the Net's first recreational use.

In 1983, UC Berkeley programmers developed a computer language that let personal computers and relatively low-speed modems connect to the Net, As the Unix language spread, the ARPAnet rapidly became democratized. The military finally pulled out, creating a parallel computer network called the Milner.

With more than 1,000 main host computers linked directly to the ARPAnet and several times that number of users linked to the host computers by 1984, Jun Postel introduced the domain name system to organize the chaos.

Postel, who began work with the ARPAnet in 1969 and today heads USC's Information Sciences Institute, gave each networked computer a unique numerical address and a suffix, such as the familiar "edu," ".corn," and ".gov." Postel first began keeping a list of network protocol numbers on a scrap of notebook paper. Now the vast universe of numbers is managed by Postel's Internet Assigned Numbers Authority organization in Marina del Rey.

From the mid-1980s on, the computer network streaked into public awareness. By the turn of that decade, ARPAnet ceased to exist as a government-sponsored network. It had simply grown too large, a victim of its own success. ARPAnet responsibilities were distributed among various companies, and the Net - now called the Internet - continued to move seamlessly ahead without most users knowing about the changeover.

At this point, the story should start sounding familiar.

The World Wide Web launched in 1992, introducing graphics and Web pages. Few people noticed it until the next year, when the Web's first commercial browser made the hodgepodge of Web pages navigable.

In April 1994, commercial online dial-up systems such as Prodigy, America Online and CompuServe, which until then connected computers by modem only to their own proprietary services, began to provide Internet access. According to BBN research, commercial Internet users outnumbered research and academic users by 2 to 1 by that year. That ratio has skyrocketed ever since.

So where does the Internet go from here?

Not surprisingly, the many fathers of the Internet - and there are at least as many fathers as there are birthplaces - all have different visions. Kahn is at Reston. Va.-based National Research Initiative Corp., where he is working to keep the Internet from fragmenting as its uses continue to multiply. Cerf just started work with Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop an interplanetary Internet. Kleinrock is working on what sounds like the fringes of science fiction, developing "smart spaces."

"In five years, you're gong to be able to lean back in your desk chair and announce a request for some information, and have the room answer," Kleinrock said. "The convergence of the Internet, wireless networks and digital information storage will make this, a reality."

How the Web Was Won

A chronology of key events in the evolution of the Internet.

1961

The first paper on packet switching, or the ability to move data electronically through bundles of data (instead of hard-wired circuits) is published by Leonard Kleinrock at MIT.

1964

Paul Baran, an analyst at Rand in Santa Monica, proposes a computer network that would have no central authority, enabling it to survive a nuclear attack.

1969

First computer network Arpanet, a Department of Defense-funded program, is set up using four high-speed computers at UCLA and three other colleges to send messages between computers. Beranek & Newman, invents first e-mail software program.

1974

The term Internet (stemming from software called "Internetworking") first comes into formal usage. Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn develop the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), allowing all data to travel over a common network by creating a standardized "envelope."

1984

More than 1,000 host computers are linked to the Internet. Wilham Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in his novel "Neuromancer."

1988

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority is created, The Authority assigns domain names, such as "com." "org," "net," and "gov."

1989

The government-supported Arpanet is decommissioned, leaving behind a vast network of computer networks. It is now called the Internet.

1992

More than 1 million host computers are linked to the Internet. The World Wide Web launches.

1993

Internet traffic grows at a 341,634 percent annual rate.

1994

Dial-up systems like America Online begin to provide access to the Internet. 10,000 Web sites exist.

1995

Web pages now constitute the bulk of Internet traffic.

1998

There are more than 29.7 million host computers connected to the Internet and more than 2.2 million Web sites.