|
A Brief
History of the Internet courtesy of
www.about-the-web.com |
|
The Internet was first conceived in the early '60s. Under the leadership of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), it grew from a paper architecture into a small network (ARPANET) intended to promote the sharing of super-computers amongst researchers in the United States. 1969 Arpanet connected the first universities in the United States. Researchers at four US campuses created the first hosts of the ARPANET, connecting Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET was a success from the very beginning. Although originally designed to allow scientists to share data and access remote computers, email quickly became the most popular application. ARPANET became a high-speed digital post office as people used it to collaborate on research projects and discuss topics of various interests. The InterNetworking Working Group becomes the first of several standards-setting entities to govern the growing network in 1972. Vinton Cerf was elected the first chairman of the INWG, and later became known as a "Father of the Internet." 1973 ARPANET went international with connections to University College in London, England and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. The general public got its first vague hint of how networked computers could be used in daily life in 1974 as the commercial version of the ARPANET went online. The ARPANET started to move away from its military/research roots. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, two grad
students at Duke University, and Steve Bellovin at the University of North
Carolina established the first USENET
newsgroups in 1979. Usenet Internet Newsgroups or simply Newsgroups.
are like a community
bulletin boards about a particular subject. There are Newsgroups on just
about every subject imaginable. Users from all over the world joined these
discussion groups to talk about the net, politics, religion and thousands of
other subjects. Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf were key
members of a team which created TCP/IP,
the common language of all Internet computers.
TCP-IP (Transmission Control Protocol -
Internet Protocol) Is a common method of assigning addresses on a network so that different types
of server operating systems can all communicate regardless of any other
communications protocol also in effect. In other words, you may be using a PC
running Windows 95, connecting to an ISP running UNIX which,
in turn, attaches to the Internet. If all three are
running TCP-IP (which they are) than they can all talk to each other. The mid-80s marked a boom in the personal
computer and super-minicomputer industries. The combination of inexpensive
desktop machines and powerful, network-ready servers allowed many companies
to join the Internet for the first time. Corporations began to use the
Internet to communicate with each other and with their customers. Internet
e-mail and newsgroups became part of life at many universities.
On 1 January 1983 the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
(Arpanet) of the US Department of Defence - the forerunner of the internet - was
switched to the TCP/IP protocol. This enabled millions of computers to go online
instead of the Network Control Protocol (NCP) which limited it to just 1,000
machines.
The Internet was an essential tool
for communications, however it also began to create concerns about privacy
and security in the digital world. New words, such as "hacker," "cracker"
and" electronic break-in", were created. These new worries were dramatically
demonstrated on Nov. 1, 1988 when a malicious program called the
"Internet
Worm" temporarily disabled approximately 6,000 of the 60,000 Internet hosts. In 1988 the Computer Emergency Response
Team (CERT) was formed to address security concerns raised by the Worm. System administrator turned author,
Clifford Stoll, caught a group of Cyber-spies in 1989, and wrote the
best-seller "The Cuckoo's Egg". The number of Internet hosts exceeded
100,000. A happy victim of its own unplanned,
unexpected success, the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990, leaving only the
vast network-of-networks called the Internet. The number of hosts exceeded
300,000. The World Wide Web is born! Tim Berners-Lee having a background of system design in real-time communications and text
processing software development, invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia
initiative for global information sharing. while working at
CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client (browser-editor)
and server in 1990-91.
The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb
(without spaces) as, after all,
when it was written in it was the only way to see the web.
In 1991 Corporations wishing to use the
Internet faced a serious problem: commercial network traffic was banned from
the National Science Foundation's NSFNET, the backbone of the Internet. In
1991 the NSF lifted the restriction on commercial use, clearing the way for
the age of electronic commerce. At the University of Minnesota, a team led
by computer programmer Mark MaCahill released "gopher," the first
point-and-click way of navigating the files of the Internet in 1991.
Originally designed to ease campus communications, gopher was freely
distributed on the Internet. MaCahill called it "the first Internet
application my mom can use. This was also the year in which Tim
Berners-Lee, working at CERN in Switzerland, posted the first computer code
of the World Wide Web in a relatively innocuous newsgroup, "alt.hypertext."
The ability to combine words, pictures, and sounds on Web pages excited
many computer programmers who saw the potential for publishing information
on the Internet in a way that could be as easy as using a word processor. 1993 The first graphical
Browser Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web
browser, became available in 1993. Traffic on the Internet expanded at a
341,634% annual growth rate. In 1994 The Rolling Stones broadcast the
Voodoo Lounge tour over the M-Bone. Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark formed
Netscape Communications Corp. Pizza Hut accepted orders for a mushroom,
pepperoni with extra cheese over the net, and Japan's Prime Minister went
online at www.kantei.go.jp. Backbone traffic exceeded 10 trillion bytes per
month. Within 30 years, the Internet had grown
from a Cold War concept for controlling the tattered remains of a
post-nuclear society to the Information Superhighway. Just as the railroads
of the 19th century enabled the Machine Age, and revolutionized the society
of the time, the Internet took us into the Information Age, and profoundly
affected the world in which we live. The Age of the Internet has arrived. Today some people telecommute over the
Internet, allowing them to choose where to live based on quality of life,
not proximity to work. Many cities view the Internet as a solution to their
clogged highways and fouled air. Schools use the Internet as a vast
electronic library, with untold possibilities. Doctors use the Internet to
consult with colleagues half a world away. And even as the Internet offers a
single Global Village, it threatens to create a 2nd class citizenship among
those without access. As a new generation grows up as accustomed to
communicating through a keyboard as in person, life on the Internet will
become an increasingly important part of life on Earth.
Here's a very well written account
History of the Internet - Timeline
Lots of good links here at the Internet Society |