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| HISTORY OF INTERNET |
History of
the Internet
The Internet was developed by Bob Kahn and
Vint Cerf in the 1970s. They began the design of what we today know as the
'internet.' It was the result of another research experiment which was called
ARPANET, which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network.
- ARPANET (1969): The precursor to the Internet was ARPANET, a network created by the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). It connected four universities and was designed to facilitate communication and resource sharing.
- TCP/IP (1970s): The development
of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) by Vint
Cerf and Bob Kahn in the 1970s was crucial for the expansion of the
Internet. TCP/IP provided a set of rules and standards for how data should
be transmitted and received across networks.
- NSFNET (1980s): The National
Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was established in the 1980s,
connecting supercomputers and academic institutions. It played a
significant role in the early expansion of the Internet.
- World Wide Web (1990): Tim
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN in
Switzerland. The Web introduced the concept of hyperlinks and provided a
user-friendly way to navigate and access information on the Internet.
- Commercialization and
Popularization (1990s): The 1990s saw the Internet becoming more
accessible and widely used. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) emerged,
allowing individuals and businesses to connect to the Internet. The
development of web browsers like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer
made it easier to browse the Web.
- Dot-com Bubble (late 1990s): The
dot-com bubble refers to a period of rapid growth in Internet-based
companies and their valuations. Many startups emerged during this time,
leading to a speculative investment frenzy. However, the bubble burst in
the early 2000s, resulting in the failure of numerous dot-com companies.
- Broadband and High-Speed
Internet (2000s): The 2000s witnessed the widespread adoption of broadband
connections, offering faster and more reliable Internet access compared to
dial-up connections. This led to a surge in multimedia content consumption,
online gaming, and the rise of platforms like YouTube and social media.
- Mobile Internet (2000s-2010s):
With the advent of smartphones, the Internet became increasingly
accessible on mobile devices. Mobile networks, such as 3G and later 4G,
enabled people to access the Internet on the go, leading to the
proliferation of mobile apps and services.
- Internet of Things (IoT): The
IoT refers to the network of interconnected devices that can communicate
and share data over the Internet. This includes smart home appliances,
wearable devices, and various sensors. The IoT has opened up new
possibilities for automation, data collection, and connectivity.
- Cloud Computing: Cloud computing
allows users to access computing resources and services over the Internet.
Companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google
Cloud have popularized cloud-based storage, computing power, and
software-as-a-service (SaaS) models.
The history
of the Internet is vast and continually evolving. The milestones mentioned above
provide a general overview, but there are many other significant developments
and innovations that have shaped the Internet into what it is today.
The history of the Internet has its origin in information theory and the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
ARPA awarded contracts in 1969 for the development of
the ARPANET project, directed by Robert Taylor and managed
by Lawrence Roberts. ARPANET adopted the packet-switching technology
proposed by Davies and Baran, underpinned by mathematical work in the early
1970s by Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA. The network was built by a
team at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, which included Bob Kahn.
In the early 1980s, national and international public data networks emerged based on the X.25 protocol, the design of which included the work of Rémi Després. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded national supercomputing centers at several universities in the United States, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, thus creating network access to these supercomputer sites for research and academic organizations in the United States. International connections to NSFNET, the emergence of architecture such as the Domain Name System, and the adoption of TCP/IP internationally on existing networks marked the beginnings of the Internet. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990. The optical backbone of the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic, as traffic transitioned to optical networks managed by Sprint, MCI, and AT&T.
Precursors
Data communication
The concept of data communication –
transmitting data between two different places through an electromagnetic
medium such as radio or an electric wire- pre-dates the introduction of the
first computers. Such communication systems were typically limited to point-to-point communication between two end devices. The telegraph in the late 19th century was the
first fully digital communication system.
Information theory
Fundamental theoretical work on information theory was developed by Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley in the 1920s. Information theory, as enunciated by Claude Shannon, in 1948, provided a firm theoretical underpinning to understand the trade-offs between signal-to-noise ratio, bandwidth, and error-free transmission in the presence of noise, in telecommunications technology.
Computers
Early computers in the 1940s had a central
processing unit and user terminals. As the technology evolved in the
1950s, new systems were devised to allow communication over longer distances
(for terminals) or with higher speeds (for interconnection of local devices)
that were necessary for the mainframe computer model. These
technologies made it possible to exchange data (such as files) between remote
computers. However, the point-to-point communication model was limited, as it
did not allow for direct communication between any two arbitrary systems; a
physical link was necessary.
Inspiration
The earliest computers were connected directly to
terminals used by an individual user. Christopher Strachey, who
became Oxford University's first Professor of Computation, filed a
patent application for time-sharing in February 1959. In June of that year, he gave a paper "Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers" at
the UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris where he passed
the concept on to J. C. R. Licklider. Licklider, vice president
at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., went on to propose a computer network in
his January 1960 paper Man-Computer Symbiosis:
In August 1962, Licklider and Welden Clark published the
paper "On-Line Man-Computer Communication" which was one of the
first descriptions of a networked future.
In October 1962, Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina as
director of the newly established Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO)
within DARPA, with a mandate to interconnect the United States
Department of Defense's main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and
SAC HQ. There he formed an informal group within DARPA to further computer
research. He began by writing memos in 1963 describing a distributed network to
the IPTO staff, whom he called "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic
Computer Network".
Packet switching
Packet switching is a rapid store and forward networking
design that divides messages up into arbitrary packets, with routing decisions
made per packet. It provides better bandwidth utilization and response times
than the traditional circuit-switching technology used for telephony,
particularly on resource-limited interconnection links.
Networks that led to the Internet
NPL network
Following discussions with J. C. R. Licklider in
1965, Donald Davies became interested in data communications for
computer networks. Later that year, at the National Physical
Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Davies designed and proposed a national
commercial data network based on packet switching. The following year, he
described the use of an "Interface computer" to act as a router. The
proposal was not taken up nationally but he produced a design for a local
network to serve the needs of NPL and prove the feasibility of packet switching
using high-speed data transmission. To deal with packet permutations (due
to dynamically updated route preferences) and datagram losses (unavoidable
when fast sources send to slow destinations), he assumed that "all users
of the network will provide themselves with some kind of error control", thus
inventing what came to be known the end-to-end principle.
ARPANET
Robert Taylor was promoted to the head of the Information
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) in 1966. He intended to realize Licklider's ideas of
an interconnected networking system. As part of the IPTO's role, three
network terminals were installed: one for System Development
Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University
of California, Berkeley, and one for the Compatible Time-Sharing System project
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Taylor's
identified need for networking became obvious from the waste of resources
apparent to him.
ARPA awarded the contract to build the network to Bolt
Beranek & Newman, and the first ARPANET link was established between the
Network Measurement Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Henry
Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science directed by Leonard
Kleinrock, and the NLS system at Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
directed by Douglas Engelbart in Menlo Park, California at 22:30
hours on October 29, 1969.
"We set up a telephone connection between us and the
guys at SRI ...", Kleinrock ... said in an interview: "We typed the L
and we asked on the phone,
"Do you see the L?"
"Yes, we see the L," came the response.
We typed the O, and we asked, "Do you see the
O."
"Yes, we see the O."
Then we typed the G, and the system crashed ...
Yet a revolution had begun"...
35 Years of the Internet, 1969–2004. Stamp of Azerbaijan, 2004.
By December 1969, a four-node network was connected by
adding the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University
of California, Santa Barbara followed by the University of Utah Graphics
Department. In the same year, Taylor helped fund ALOHAnet, a system
designed by Professor Norman Abramson and others at the University
of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa that transmitted data by radio between seven computers
on four islands in Hawaii.
technologies used.
NSFNET
T3 NSFNET Backbone, c. 1992
NASA developed the TCP/IP-based NASA Science Network
(NSN) in the mid-1980s, connecting space scientists to data and information
stored anywhere in the world. In 1989, the DECnet-based Space Physics
Analysis Network (SPAN) and the TCP/IP-based NASA Science Network (NSN) were
brought together at NASA Ames Research Center creating the first multiprotocol
wide area network called the NASA Science Internet, or NSI. NSI was established
to provide a totally integrated communications infrastructure to the NASA
scientific community for the advancement of earth, space, and life sciences. As
a high-speed, multiprotocol, international network, NSI provided connectivity
to over 20,000 scientists across all seven continents.
Optical networking
Forty years later, on November 13, 1957, Columbia University physics student Gordon Gould first realized how to make light by stimulated emission through a process of optical amplification. He coined the term LASER for this technology Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Using Gould's light amplification method (patented as “Optically Pumped Laser Amplifier”), Theodore Maiman made the first working laser on May 16, 1960.
Gould co-founded Optelecom, Inc. in 1973 to
commercialize his inventions in optical fiber telecommunications. just
as Corning Glass was producing the first commercial fiber optic cable
in small quantities. Optelecom configured its own fiber lasers and optical amplifiers
into the first commercial optical communication systems which it delivered
to Chevron and the US Army Missile Defense. Three years
later, GTE deployed the first optical telephone system in 1977 in
Long Beach, California. By the early 1980s, optical networks powered by
lasers, LED, and optical amplifier equipment supplied by Bell
Labs, NTT, and Perelli were used by select universities and
long-distance telephone providers.
TCP/IP goes global (1980s)
CERN and the European Internet
In early 1982, NORSAR and Peter Kirstein's group
at University College London (UCL) left the ARPANET and began to use TCP/IP
over SATNET. UCL continued to provide access between the ARPANET and academic
networks in the UK, a role it had performed since 1973.
The Computer Science Network (CSNET) began
operation in 1981 to provide networking connections to institutions that could
not connect directly to ARPANET.
Its first international connection was to Israel in 1984.
Soon after, connections were established to computer science departments in
Canada, France, and Germany.
The link to the Pacific
South Korea set up a two-node domestic TCP/IP network in
1982, the System Development Network (SDN), adding a third node the following
year. SDN was connected to the rest of the world in August 1983 using UUCP
(Unix-to-Unix-Copy); connected to CSNET in December 1984; and formally
connected to the NSFNET in 1990.
Japan, which had built the UUCP-based network JUNET in
1984, connected to CSNET, and later to NSFNET in 1989, marking the spread
of the Internet to Asia.
New Zealand adopted the UK's Coloured Book protocols as
an interim standard and established its first international IP connection to
the U.S. in 1989.
A "digital divide" emerges
Internet users in 2015 as a percentage of a country's population
Fixed broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
Asia and Oceania
The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC),
headquartered in Australia, manages IP address allocation for the continent.
APNIC sponsors an operational forum, the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet
Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT).
The People's Republic of China established its first TCP/IP college network, Tsinghua University's TUNET in 1991. The PRC went on to make its first global Internet connection in 1994, between the Beijing Electro-Spectrometer Collaboration and Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center. However, China went on to implement its own digital divide by implementing a country-wide content filter.
Japan hosted the annual meeting of the Internet
Society, INET'92, in Kobe. Singapore developed TECHNET in 1990,
and Thailand gained a global Internet connection between Chulalongkorn
University and UUNET in 1992.
Latin America
As with the other regions, the Latin American and
Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) manages the IP address
space and other resources for its area. LACNIC, headquartered in Uruguay,
operates DNS root, reverse DNS, and other key services.
1990–2003: Rise of the global Internet, Web 1.0
IPv6
The last available IPv4 address was assigned in
January 2011. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses which limits the address
space to 2 addresses,
i.e. 4294967296 addresses. IPv4 is being replaced by its
successor, called "IPv6", which uses 128-bit addresses, providing 2 addresses,
i.e. 340282366920938463463374607431768211456, a vastly increased
address space. The shift to IPv6 is expected to take many years, decades, or
perhaps longer, to complete, since there were four billion machines with IPv4
when the shift began.
2004-present: Web 2.0, global ubiquity, social media
File sharing
Resource or file sharing has been an important activity
on computer networks from well before the Internet was established and was
supported in a variety of ways including bulletin board systems (1978), Usenet (1980), Kermit (1981),
and many others. The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for use on the
Internet was standardized in 1985 and is still in use today.[240] A
variety of tools were developed to aid the use of FTP by helping users discover
files they might want to transfer, including the Wide Area Information
Server (WAIS) in 1991, Gopher in 1991, Archie in
1991, Veronica in 1992, Jughead in 1993, Internet
Relay Chat (IRC) in 1988, and eventually the World Wide Web (WWW)
in 1991 with Web directories and Web search engines.
All of these tools are general purpose and can be used to share a wide variety of content, but sharing of music files, software, and later movies and videos are major uses. And while some of this sharing is legal, large portions are not. Lawsuits and other legal actions caused Napster in 2001, eDonkey2000 in 2005, Kazaa in 2006, and Limewire in 2010 to shut down or refocus their efforts. The Pirate Bay, founded in Sweden in 2003, continues despite a trial and appeal in 2009 and 2010 that resulted in jail terms and large fines for several of its founders. File sharing remains contentious and controversial with charges of theft of intellectual property on the one hand and charges of censorship on the other.
File Hosting Services
File hosting allowed people to expand their
computer's hard drives and "host" their files on a server. Most file
hosting services offer free storage, as well as larger storage amounts for a
fee. These services have greatly expanded the Internet for business and
personal use.
Google Drive, launched on April 24, 2012, has become the
most popular file-hosting service. Google Drive allows users to store, edit,
and share files with themselves and other users. Not only does this application
allow for file editing, hosting, and sharing. It also acts as Google's own
free-to-access office programs, such as Google Docs, Google Slides,
and Google Sheets. This application served as a useful tool for University
professors and students, as well as those who are in need of Cloud storage.
Mega, having over 200 million users, is an encrypted storage and communication system that offers users free and paid storage, with an emphasis on privacy. Being three of the largest file hosting services, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Mega all represent the core ideas and values of these services.
Online piracy
The earliest form of online piracy began with a P2P (peer-to-peer) music-sharing service named Napster, which launched in 1999. Sites
like LimeWire, The Pirate Bay, and BitTorrent allowed for
anyone to engage in online piracy, sending ripples through the media industry.
With online piracy came a change in the media industry as a whole.
Mobile phones and the Internet
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