A Brief History Of The Internet

Until the mid-nineties, the importance of the Internet was something that eluded a lot of people. Even today there are a lot of misconceptions held about it, where it came from, what it can do. It's a new frontier and it's rules aren't completely defined yet. This makes it full of potential and very exciting to be part of.

The internet has evolved over many decades, and due to the work of many great people, has become arguably the most important feature of the twentieth century. Never before has information exchange been so easy and accessible. Never has the world been so small...

To understand the technology of the internet is not hard. The elements of its infrastructure such as packet-switching, http, ftp and telnet use simple and robust principles, and this history explains when they originated and what they do.

1957, In response to the USSR launching Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, the United States formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) - within the Department of Defense to ensure a US lead in military science and technology.

J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it...

Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation, was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to investigate how it could maintain communications after a nuclear attack. A military research network was required, decentralized so that if any cities were destroyed, they could still have a means if control over their nuclear arms for a counter-attack. If one network connection was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternative routes.

Baran's proposal was a packet switched network - a theory developed by Leonard Kleinrock of MIT. Packet switching forms the basis of all Internet connections.

"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 was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."

Work on the practicalities continued. In 1965, Lawrence Roberts of MIT managed to connect a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed, but the line quality was too low to be used in any serious way.

In 1968, ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN - the pioneering Massachusetts company.

The network was actually wired together (via 50 Kbps circuits) in 1969. It linked four nodes:

• University of California at Los Angeles
• SRI (in Stanford)
• University of California at Santa Barbara, and
• University of Utah.

In 1972, Ray Tomlinson of BBN created the first e-mail program. The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published.

In 1973, The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between computers, was published. Work began on the TCP/IP architecture which would allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.

Most of these protocols are published as 'RFCs' - Request For Comments. In this firm they are distributed amongst the community, and standards are bashed out!

In 1974, the term 'Internet' was coined by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in a paper on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

In 1976, Ethernet, which allowed extremely fast data throughput on coaxial cables, was developed by Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe. This is the protocol used in today's LANs (Local Area Networks). The UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) protocol was developed.

In 1979, USENET (the decentralized news group network) was created by Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at University of North Carolina, and programmers Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. It was based on UUCP.

The creation of BITNET, "Because its Time Network", by IBM, introduced the "store and forward" network. It was used for email and mailing lists, particularly for e-mail discussion lists (listserv). These e-mail discussion lists formed another major part in the community building that was happening. CompuServe offer the first commercial email to home users.

In 1980, CompuServe provide the first online chat system - the 'CB Simulator'.

In 1981, a second backbone technology was created by the National Science Foundation called CSNET. It ran at 56 Kbps. It was intended to network for institutions without access to ARPANET. An interface between CSNET and ARPANET was proposed.

By the end of 1981, there were 213 hosts connected to the burgeoning Internet, mostly via ARPANET.

In 1983, the Internet Activities Board (IAB) was created. On January 1st, every machine connected to ARPANET had to change over to TCP/IP from NCP. Also in 1983, the University of Wisconsin created the Domain Name System (DNS). This allowed packets to be directed to a readable domain name instead of just the (hard to remember) IP number.

1984, The ARPANET was divided into two: MILNET - to serve the needs of the military and ARPANET to support the advanced research component.

In 1985, The National Science Foundation started installing the new T1 lines within CSNET. These allowed data transfer rates of up to 1.5Mb/s. By the end of the year there were almost 2000 hosts online.

In 1987, BITNET and CSNET were merged by the National Science Foundation to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN). Number of hosts online: 28,000.

1988, Number of hosts online: 56,000.

1989, As the tools for email, ftp and telnet became standardised, they became easier to use. Ever incerasing number of people started using them. The need to index the internet was recognised, and Archie was created - a program which would periodically check all known openly available ftp sites, list their files, and build a searchable index. It wasn't very easy to use.

Also, Thinking Machines, Corp. developed their Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), which indexed the text of files in a database and allow searches of the files. At its peak, Thinking Machines maintained information on over 600 databases.

In 1989-90, Tim Berners-Lee and collegues at CERN in Geneva designed HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) - a system of embedding links in text. This protocol officially became the World-Wide-Web that we know and love in 1991.

ANS, Advanced Network & Services came up with the concept of the T3 line - allowing 45 Mb/s. NSF quickly adopted the new network and by the end of 1991 all of its sites were connected by this new backbone.

While the T3 lines were being constructed, the Department of Defense disbanded the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone. The original 50Kbs lines of ARPANET were taken out of service.

Number of hosts online: 313,000.

In 1991, gopher, the first reasonably friendly interface to the 'net became available. Some say it was named after the University of Minnesota mascot - the golden gopher, some say it was designed to 'go for' things. To use it, you select numbers next to the items that interest you in a hierarchy.

The enhance gopher's useability, the University of Nevada at Reno created the VERONICA (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives) searchable index of gopher menus. It used a spider (software) which crawled gopher menus around the world, collecting links and retrieving them for the index. Spider software is still used by search engines. Similar indexing software was developed for single sites, called JUGHEAD (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display).

In 1992, Delphi was the first commercial online service to offer Internet access. It provided an email connection in July and full Internet service in November 1992.

In 1993, the first graphical browser, Mosaic, was created by Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He later became the brains behind Netscape Corp which produced the most successful web browser and server until Bill Gates finally 'got' the internet, was gripped by panic, developed Internet Explorer. There was a big anti-trust court case

InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services: directory and database services

Number of hosts online: 2,056,000

In 1994, Pizza Hut first offered online ordering on its Website. First Virtual, the first online bank, opens.

Michael Dertouzos of MIT persuaded Tim Berners-Lee and others to form the World Wide Web Consortium to promote and develop standards for the Web. This Consortium has ensured that there are common standards present in every browser.

Number of hosts online: 3,864,000

1995, The Internet was initially funded by the government. It was limited to research, education, and government uses. Commercial uses were prohibited unless they directly served the goals of research and education. In May 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone, all traffic relied on commercial networks and that restriction disappeared.

AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online in 1995.

This bring us more-or-less up to date. The next big change will be an expansion of the IP protocol to allow many more IP addresses than there presently are. An IP address is currently 4 bytes long. Its a string of 4 numbers from 0-255. The proposal is to make it 4 numbers from 0-65,535.

These days, most Internet traffic is carried by backbones of independent ISPs, including MCI, AT&T, Sprint, UUnet, BBN planet, ANS, and more. That traffic and the numbers of users accessing the Internet is doubling every 100 days.

The Internet has a history of explosive growth, and is becoming ever more widespread. Broadband access is becoming increasingly available and affordable. There's Web-TV and Web enabled mobile phones. Cars and even refrigerators now have built-in web browsers. Big companies are spending fortunes on research so there's a lot more to come.

The Internet is a tool designed for the purpose of sharing information. The freedom is profound and works both ways...

• You can find almost anything on the internet if you look hard enough. If you have the patience - there are billions of web pages, databases, tools, products, services out there. I am constantly amazed by peoples' ingenuity and I love the fact that you can access it all from your home.
• You can publish anything you want, as long as it's not illegal in your country. You have complete creative freedom - if you've got an idea - create a website for it... You don't need to start a company, have premises, employ anyone... Have maximum control, and almost no overheads.

Currently you can create an online storefront which looks every bit as good, and works just as well as a major company for less than $60 per year. The Webmaster's Bureau will show you exactly how in the coming lessons...

I guarantee that you will really enjoy building and owning your own website. When you've done it once, then you can do it again - in half the time... and you will! Web authoring is great fun, and it's addictive. Once the orders start rolling in and you realise you're actually making quite a lot of money, you'll be able to create more cash-generating sites whenever the inspiration takes you.

The Internet is a wonderful place!

For more info on Internet history check out: Hobbes' Internet Timeline and The Internet Society