This is Internet On The Air, I'm Todd Mundt. Watch history in the making...details in a moment.

Funding Credit: Internet On The Air is a production of the University of Michigan School of Information and Michigan radio, made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

In the novel by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle wakes up from a 20-year nap to find a world he hardly recognizes. Had early developers of the Internet taken a similar nap, they would be just as astonished to awake to what has transpired in the two decades since the birth of the medium.

Paul Edwards is a professor at Stanford University who studies the history of computers. He compares the growth of the Internet to that of other networks like railroads and telephones. At an early stage, competing technologies give way to common standards. In the case of the Internet, standardization occurred in network protocols, which allow computers to talk to each other. Twenty years ago, companies like I-B-M and Digital offered competing protocols...but free software, often developed by graduate students, led to a common standard now in use around the world.

Technologies are often used in ways their creators never envisioned. But Professor Edwards says the speed at which the Internet has evolved is unusual. He points out that the growth of many of its most popular applications, like e-mail, news groups and browsers, was not envisioned by the creators of the Internet. But once they appeared, they spread rapidly.

The flexibility of software helps explain the rapid rate of change now seen on the Internet. But none of this would have been possible without the acceptance of a common standard for communication.

To learn more about the history of the Internet,...and to hear remarks by Paul Edwards...visit our Web site at www.iota.org. For Internet On The Air, I'm Todd Mundt.