Inventing The Internet Pdf
Kandy Swartzel
The origins of the internet are rooted in the USA of the 1950s. The Cold War was at its height and huge tensions existed between North America and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers were in possession of deadly nuclear weapons, and people lived in fear of long-range surprise attacks. The US realised it needed a communications system that could not be affected by a Soviet nuclear attack.
As ARPANET grew, a set of rules for handling data packets needed to be put in place. In 1974, computer scientists Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf invented a new method called transmission-control protocol, popularly known as TCP/IP, which essentially allowed computers to speak the same language.
IP stands for Internet Protocol and, when combined with TCP, helps internet traffic find its destination. Every device connected to the internet is given a unique IP number. Known as an IP address, the number can be used to find the location of any internet-connected device in the world.
In the early 1980s, cheaper technology and the appearance of desktop computers allowed the rapid development of local area networks (LANs). An increase in the amount of computers on the network made it difficult to keep track of all the different IP addresses.
This problem was solved by the introduction of the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983. DNS was invented by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel at the University of Southern California. It was one of the innovations that paved the way for the World Wide Web.
The invention of DNS, the common use of TCP/IP and the popularity of email caused an explosion of activity on the internet. Between 1986 and 1987, the network grew from 2,000 hosts to 30,000. People were now using the internet to send messages to each other, read news and swap files. However, advanced knowledge of computing was still needed to dial in to the system and use it effectively, and there was still no agreement on the way that documents on the network were formatted.
The launch of the Mosaic browser in 1993 opened up the web to a new audience of non-academics, and people started to discover how easy it was to create their own HTML web pages. Consequently, the number of websites grew from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996.
In 1990, Berners-Lee developed Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and designed the Universal Resource Identifier (URI) system. HTTP is the language computers use to communicate HTML documents over the internet, and the URI, also known as a URL, provides a unique address where the pages can be easily found.
The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.
In 1993, Marc Andreessen, an American student in Illinois, launched a new browser called Mosaic. Created at the National Center for Super-computing Applications (NCSA), Mosaic was easy to download and install, worked on many different computers and provided simple point-and-click access to the World Wide Web. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images next to text, rather than in a separate window.
In 1994 Andreesen formed Netscape Communications with entrepreneur Jim Clark. They led the company to create Netscape Navigator, a widely used internet browser that at the time was faster and more sophisticated than any of the competition. By 1995, Navigator had around 10 million global users.
Venture capitalists flourished and many companies were founded on dubious business plans. The most notorious of these was the high fashion online retailer Boo.com, which spent its way through $200 million, only to collapse within six months of its website going live.
However, despite their failure, such businesses helped cause a fundamental transformation and left an important legacy. Many investors lost money, but they also helped to finance the new system and lay the groundwork for future success in ecommerce.
The invention of the internet cannot be credited to one person. Instead, it was the work of many engineers, programmers and scientists, according to History.com. While the modern internet was developed from ARPANET's adoption communications model developed by Kahn and Vinton, this is different from the World Wide Web.
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, or WWW, which is what most people recognize as the Internet today and allows users to connect to other pages on the Internet through hypertexts, according to Britannica
The World Wide Web is often wrongly used to refer to the Internet, when it really is a common way to access information on the Internet through websites. According to History.com, the World Wide Web helped to make the Internet more popular.
Google caught the attention of investors in Silicon Valley, leading to the creation of Google Inc. in August of 1998. Page and Brin then moved their offices to a garage, where the company is famously known to have started.
The history of the Internet has its origin in 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.[1][2][3]
Computer science was an emerging discipline in the late 1950s that began to consider time-sharing between computer users, and later, the possibility of achieving this over wide area networks. J. C. R. Licklider developed the idea of a universal network at the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Independently, Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation proposed a distributed network based on data in message blocks in the early 1960s, and Donald Davies conceived of packet switching in 1965 at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), proposing a national commercial data network in the United Kingdom.
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. The network of Interface Message Processors (IMPs) was built by a team at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, with the design and specification led by Bob Kahn. The host-to-host protocol was specified by a group of graduate students at UCLA, led by Steve Crocker, along with Jon Postel and Vint Cerf. The ARPANET expanded rapidly across the United States with connections to the United Kingdom and Norway.
Several early packet-switched networks emerged in the 1970s which researched and provided data networking. Louis Pouzin and Hubert Zimmermann pioneered a simplified end-to-end approach to internetworking at the IRIA. Peter Kirstein put internetworking into practice at University College London in 1973. Bob Metcalfe developed the theory behind Ethernet and the PARC Universal Packet. ARPA projects, the International Network Working Group and commercial initiatives led to the development of various ideas for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. Vint Cerf, now at Stanford University, and Bob Kahn, now at DARPA, published research in 1974 that evolved into the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), two protocols of the Internet protocol suite. The design included concepts pioneered in the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin. The development of packet switching networks was underpinned by mathematical work in the 1970s by Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA.
In the late 1970s, national and international public data networks emerged based on the X.25 protocol, designed by Rmi Desprs and others. 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 on existing networks in the United States and around the world marked the beginnings of the Internet.[4][5][6] Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia.[7] Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990.[8] 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 in the United States.
A network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines [...] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper
In October 1962, Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina as director of the newly established Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within ARPA, 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".[20]
Although he left the IPTO in 1964, five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his vision of universal networking that provided the impetus for one of his successors, Robert Taylor, to initiate the ARPANET development. Licklider later returned to lead the IPTO in 1973 for two years.[21]