How The Internet Began
Note from the editor: We have had three articles on the history of social media and we thought this guest would make an awesome follow-up. Here’s what we have covered before:
- Before Social Media: Precursors
- The Advancement of Social Media – The History of Social Media Series
- The Rise of Media Sharing – History of Social Media
- The History of Facebook
The Internet is often referred to as ‘the world wide web’ or ‘the web’, but the truth is the world wide web (www) is just another service like email, which operates within the Internet (more on this later).
What is the Internet?
The best way to describe the internet, in layman’s terms is: “A worldwide system of interconnected computers”. Now for the more technically minded amongst us a good definition of the Internet would go something like “a worldwide system of interconnected computers and networks which uses the Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol, also known as TCP/IP”.
When and How the Internet Began
It can be argued that the Internet really began when the telegraph system was invented back in the 19th century but in reality the modern day history of the Internet began when computers first made an appearance in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It all began with the connection of terminals and mainframe computers which very quickly developed into connections between computers and in the 60’s and 70’s the discovery and creation of packet switching and the packet switch networks such as Telenet.
The most notable of these packet switch networks was developed in 1969 by the US Department of Defences Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA, originally known as ARPA). The ARPANET which was used to develop the protocols for ‘internetworking’ (the real technical term for the Internet); Without getting too technical this packet switch network allows multiple networks to be joined together.
It wasn’t until 1982 when the Internet was officially born, we saw the introduction of TCP/IP and the accumulation of interconnected networks. This network of networks originally started at 22:30 on the 29th October 1969 as a connection between the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute. Five weeks later this network expanded into a larger four way connection and by 1981 the network consisted of two hundred and thirteen networks and was growing at a rate of one new network every twenty days.
Why was the Internet Created?
The Internet’s original purpose was to allow government engineers (ARPA) and the universities already connected via TCP/IP to share data and information and transfer files from different locations around the network. The Internet was created with the main intention of becoming a fault-free military network that could be used by the U.S government as a form a data transportation and storage which could survive a natural disaster and even a nuclear war.
How Has the Internet Evolved?
The internet we see on our systems today is the world wide web; the www dates back to the 1980’s when an Independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research named Tim Berners-Lee started experimenting with Hypertext (the interlinking of pages via hyper-links).
It was Christmas of 1990 when Berners-Lee had developed and built all the tools necessary for a working world wide web! These tools included the Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) the Hypertext markup language which we now know as HTML and a web editor / web browsers called ‘WorldWideWeb’. This was then very quickly followed by the first Hypertext Transfer Protocol server software which was later given the name ‘CERN httpd’ and then of course came the first web pages which described Tim Berners-Lee’s work and the world wide web project.
On 6th August 1991 the world wide web made its début and became a publicly available service on the Internet.
This post was provided by Broadbandchoices.co.uk; for a comprehensive and impartial broadband speed test
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by M e d a
For those who are interested in learning more about this subject, check out “A Brief History of the Future”. A superb, intelligent look at the origins of the internet, along with the fascinating people who made it possible!
Good to know the history of internet that we work on to everyday…nice post!
Glad to know the history of internet that we work every day on it.Thanks for your sharing
Hei there. Thanks for sharing this information. It’s good and interesting to know how Internet was found and began to be used worldwide.
This is a great post, quite informative. With so many users out there, I bet a large portion of people have no clue where the internet came from. Interesting