History of the Internet

The History Of the Internet

The Internet was invented in the 1960's. It's purpose was to link universities and government computers, in able to exchange information and share programs. There were many engineering challenges, the first was beginning with the design of a packet switching network. A network system that could make computers communicate with each other without need for the traditional central system. The others were the design of the machines, data exchange protocols and the software to run it. What eventually grew out of this idea is a astonishing cheap technology that is rapidly and dramatically changing the world we live in. It is available to people at home, in schools and universities and in public libraries.

The Internet is not owned or controlled by any company, corporation, or nation. It connects people in 65 countries through computers, fiber optics, satellites, and phone lines. It is changing cultural patterns, business pracrices, the consumer industry, and the way people research. It helps people keep people up-to-date on world events, find a restaurant in Tokoyo or a cheap flight to Floridam play games, talk to friends or family or even find them.

With Sputnik and the Cold War, President Eisenhower thought it would be wise to create an Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to Keep the United States at the top of technology. ARPA would soon begin research that would eventually lead to the Internet. Before ARPA began supporting networking research seriously, Leonar Kleinrock had already invented the technology of the Internet in 1962. The packet switching technology he proposed was a huge improvement over the circuit-switched telephone network. In which the entire path connecting a voice call between two people was dedicated only yo their conversation, even when they were silent. Silence occupies about one =third of speech patterns, but in the transmission of data. silence can occupy as much as 99.9 percent of the data stream. Packet switching avoids this inefficiency by chopping messages in to packets, and sending these packets of data independently through the network as if they are electronic letters passing through the network as if they are electronic letters passing through an electronic post office.

In 1963, JCR Licklider, head of the computer research effort at ARPA, articulated a vision of a network that would connect people and machine together worldwide. In the mid-1960's, ARPA was determined that it needed a network to connect together the research computers and programs it funded. In 1966, Larry Roberts was brought to ARPA to manage the program o create the packet-switched ARPAnet. This network was to form the foundation of the Internet.

In January of 1969 a contracr was let to Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Mass., to design the machines. Supervised by Frank Heart, they designed small machines called Interface Message Processors (IMPs), specifically for packet-switching technology. A new communications protocol for packet switching was needed and they came up with the Network Control Protocol (NCP). The new network was ready to be exposed at UCLA in September of 1969.

Universities and research organizations were among the first to join the network in order to exchange information. Electronic mail was introduced in 1972 by Ray Tomlinson. NCP was phased out by a new communication protocol technology. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) which was created by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in 1973. It was excepted by the U.S. government in 1978, and became the de facto networking standard in 1983. More networks began to pop up in the 1980's. Education and commercial organizations that fell outside the original charter wanted to use the same packet-switching technologies, and the system came to be known as the Internet during this period. The Internet had far exceeded its original purpose, and was providing the motivation for a vast technological revolution that was just ahead.

There were major innovations in the software before the Internet could function as a global information utility. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at the Eurpean Laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, proposed the World Wide Web project. and a new language for linked computers known as HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language). Simple tools to retrive information from the web and communicate would be the focus of much activity in the next few years. In 1991 the University of Minnesota developed "Gopher," the first successfull Internet document retrival system. In the spring of 1993, a group of graduate students at the University of Illinois computer laboratories, led by 21 year old Marc Andreessen, created a "browser" program called Mosaic, and distributed it free. Netscape and then Microsoft followed with browsers that greatly simplified a computer used's ability to search the Internet of Information.