Overview: Internet
history
As a project and as a hardware/software
network the Internet began as a communications research project of
the US Department
of Defense.
Its development
was led by what Ike had espied, namely, the “military-industrial
complex.” Actually, this proved to be a “military-industrial-educational complex.” During
the 1990s as personal computers and corporate networking
expanded off-the-charts, to most, the Internet seemed to
appear as if out
of nowhere. However, it hadn’t.
"In response to the former Russian Soviet Union’s (USSR) launch
of the space satellite “Sputnik” in 1957, the ARPA/DARPA formed within the US Department of Defense (DoD). Its name switched back
and forth over the years from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (1958 & 1993)
to the Defense Research Projects Agency (1972 & 1996).
In 1962, Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency),
was commissioned by the U. S. Air Force to study how it could maintain
command and control over its missiles and bombers after a nuclear attack.
This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear
strike. It had to be decentralized so that if any locations (cities)
in the U. S. were attacked, the military could still have control of
nuclear arms for a counter-attack.
As a military project, the Internet
designers sought ultimate flexibility, redundancy and decentralization in
order to respond most effectively to a nuclear attack. If the computers
were blown up on the East Coast, others in Texas or Guam or wherever
else the military had secreted servers on the Net could continue
to operate. It was a starfish like creature. The starfish, when partially
cut up
and thrown back into the water, regenerates into several new creatures.
The objective was to create a self-healing and regenerative communications
system.
Baran's finished document described several ways to accomplish this.
His final proposal was a packet switched network. Packet switching is
the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled
to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the
forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until
the information arrives at its final destination computer. This is crucial
to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any
given point, the message can be resent by the originator.
1968 ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN
Technologies. BBN had
selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build
the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four
nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University
of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was
wired together via 50 Kbps circuits.
1972 saw the first e-mail program created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN. The
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was renamed The Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (or DARPA)
ARPANET used the Network Control Protocol or NCP to
transfer data. This allowed communications between hosts running
on the same network.
In
1973 development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP. It
was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob
Kahn from DARPA. In 1974 Cerf is the first to use the term “Internet.” The
new TCP/IP protocol allows diverse computer networks to interconnect
and communicate with each other.
In 1983 every machine connected to
ARPANET uses TCP/IP. In 1986 the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) is established as a technical
forum. Developments progress in hardware and software, and from 1992 onward,
notable advances are made in the creation of an Internet language called “hypertext” and “graphical
user interfaces.” These
provide the language and easy-access-gateways for the general computer
user.
Various organizations such as The Internet Society (ISOC) are
formed on the open organization model to
provide a modicum of standardization to guide Internet expansion.
As the new millennium opened the Internet
was expanding
exponentially and dynamically, creating the global communication phenomenon
from which emerges something only oxymoronic language can approach,
namely, “Virtual
Reality” and the “World-Wide Web.” Source Also, Internet
timeline.
