Speaker: Dr Brian Carpenter

For most people, the Internet seemed to appear out of nowhere in about 1995. Since then, it has revolutionised the way that hundreds of millions of people get news and information, stay in touch with family, structure their social life, entertain themselves, or do their jobs.

How did this happen? Was it an accident or a plan? How did the Internet fly in the face of established telecommunications services? What were the engineering design features of Internet technology that allowed this to happen, and how important were technological and regulatory developments? What was the "dot com bubble" really about? But most important, what can we learn about the future from this very recent history?

The lecture will consider all these questions, briefly tracing the technical history of the Internet from the invention of packet switching in 1962, through its first deployment in the ARPANET in 1969, and looking at the continuous growth of the Internet since it took its modern shape in the late 1980s. Current leading-edge research and standards development will be described, followed by some speculation about the future.

Dr Carpenter was privileged to lead the networking team at CERN, the European laboratory where the world wide web was invented, from 1985 to 1996. He then joined IBM just in time to witness the Internet boom from an industry viewpoint, and became an IBM Distinguished Engineer working on Internet standards and technology. He joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Auckland in September 2007. This event is open to the public and free of charge.