History of AI and Internet

Jack Haverty via Internet-history <[email protected]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:50:37 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.culture.internet.history
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
With AI now in the news all the time, I've been wondering about the 
history of AI in The Internet, i.e., how AI technology has been used 
within the Internet over the years, rather than just a service which 
people can access over The Internet.   Personally I only know of a few 
such uses of AI in a communications role, quite a while ago.  But maybe 
others remember more...?

In the mid-1970s, I was involved in an AI project at MIT in Licklider's 
group, sponsored by ARPA.   It wasn't really part of the ARPANET but it 
did relate to communications.   The project involved using AI techniques 
of that era, then called "expert systems", to have computers decode 
hand-sent Morse radio transmissions.   The Intelligence Community was 
apparently quite interested in this problem at that time, and the 
project ran for several years and was deemed a success.

FYI, see chapter 22 of https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA239925 for 
info on that AI project.  Personally, I think of that 1990 report as an 
enumeration of "ARPA's Greatest Hits".   There are six projects listed 
from the Information Processing Techniques Office of ARPA (IPTO, where 
all the networking and computer projects happened).  Another project of 
those six IPTO successes is The ARPANET, described in Chapter 20.   The 
Internet was probably still too immature to be included at the time .

Similarly, while I was at BBN in the 1980s there were tools developed to 
visualize activity in the ARPANET, and do tasks involved in network 
design - figuring out where new lines were needed, reconfiguring the 
topology of the ARPANET to address changes in traffic patterns, and 
other such analyses.  I'm not sure those projects would be recognized as 
"AI" today, but they were widely used to manage a variety of networks 
such as the ARPANET and DDN. The idea was to use computers to augment 
people skills, as it is in today's AI as well.

Bob Kahn and I had a discussion at some point in late 1982 about AI and 
networks in ARPA's world.   Bob was aware of the ARPA-sponsored project 
done at MIT in the mid 1970s which used AI "expert system" techniques to 
decode Morse code.   We mused that a similar expert system approach 
could be used to manage networks, especially the emerging Internet which 
was much more complex than the ARPANET and had few tools available for 
operations and management.

The concept was to use the plentiful supply of BBN engineers who had 
been debugging Internet crises for several years as the "experts", 
observing how they worked, and translating what they did into software 
to do tasks "automatically".   That started the "Automated Network 
Management" (ANM) project as a new research task at BBN.   I wrote the 
proposal to ARPA and waited for the contract to be signed.  But when BBN 
reorganized in July 1983 the ANM contract and I went separate ways so I 
never got to work on ANM and I don't think there was enough detail in 
the proposal to convey the concept onwards to the new project team.

It strikes me that the real driver of AI today has evolved only partly 
from advances in algorithms such as LLMs.  I think another major factor 
has been the massive drop in computing costs over the last 
half-century.  AI systems, such as that Morse Code project, were 
affordable only by well-funded parts of government in the 1970s, 
requiring millions of dollars/pounds/rubles/yen/lira to field a system 
that provided minimal capability.  Today, the system that cost millions 
in the 1970s now costs pennies by comparison.

Anybody else know more about the history of the use of AI *within* (not 
just on top of) The Internet?   For example, when there are problems in 
today's Internet, are AI techniques and tools used to diagnose and 
repair them?   What's the History of such things?

/Jack Haverty

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