Brief History of Internet
The Internet had its roots during the 1960's as a
project of the United States government's Department of Defense, to create a
non-centralized network. This project was called ARPANET (Advanced Research
Projects Agency Network), created by the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects
Agency established in 1969 to provide a secure and survivable communications
network for organizations engaged in defense-related research.
In order to make the network more global a new
sophisticated and standard protocol was needed. They developed IP (Internet
Protocol) technology which defined how electronic messages were packaged,
addressed, and sent over the network. The standard protocol was invented in
1977 and was called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol).
TCP/IP allowed users to link various branches of other complex networks
directly to the ARPANET, which soon came to be called the Internet.
Researchers and academics in other fields began to
make use of the network, and eventually the National Science Foundation (NSF),
which had created a similar and parallel network, called NSFNet, took over much
of the TCP/IP technology from ARPANET and established a distributed network of
networks capable of handling far greater traffic. In 1985, NSF began a program
to establish Internet access across the United States. They created a backbone
called the NSFNET and opened their doors to all educational facilities,
academic researchers, government agencies, and international research
organizations. By the 1990's the Internet experienced explosive growth. It is
estimated that the number of computers connected to the Internet was doubling
every year.
Businesses rapidly realized that, by making
effective use of the Internet they could tune their operations and offer new
and better services to their customers, so they started spending vast amounts
of money to develop and enhance the Internet. This generated violent
competition among the communications carriers and hardware and software
suppliers to meet this demand. The result is that bandwidth (i.e., the
information carrying capacity of communications lines) on the Internet has
increased tremendously and costs have dropped. It is widely believed that the
Internet has played a significant role in the economic success.
The World Wide Web (WWW) allows computer users to
position and view multimedia-based documents (i.e., documents with text,
graphics, animations, audios and/or videos) on almost any subject. Even though
the Internet was developed more than three decades ago, the introduction of the
WWW was a relatively recent event. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN (the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics) developed the World Wide Web and
several communication protocols that form the backbone of the WWW.
The Internet and the World Wide Web will surely be
listed among the most significant and profound creations of humankind. In the
past, most computer applications ran on stand alone computers. (i.e., computers
that were not connected to one another) Today’s applications can be written to
communicate among the world’s hundreds of millions of computers. The Internet
makes our work easier by mixing computing and communications technologies. It
makes information immediately and conveniently accessible worldwide. It makes
it possible for individuals and small businesses to get worldwide contact.
