A Quick History of the Internet

The Internet as we know it today, began as a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA was formed in the aftermath of the Soviet launch of Sputnik. The government, recognizing the importance of computer networks and communications, tasked ARPA with creating a network that could withstand natural and civil disasters. ARPA ultimately created the TCP/IP protocol, the backbone of the Internet.

TCP/IP is a packet protocol. Basically, it takes information and breaks it into pieces. Included in the piece is information about where the information needs to go and how to put the pieces back together. It then routes the packets (or request) to the specified location. These packets can get to their destination via many different routes along the network. Not all packets need to go through the same servers. This allows the Internet speed and redundancy. At the end of the journey the packets are put back together and the request is filled.

As ARPANET grew it merged and took over other networks and by the 1980’s the term Internet was in widespread use. Early Internet applications included e-mail, telnet and GOPHER. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, consulting to CERN, began work a program called “WorldWideWeb” to give light to his dream of creating a common information space in which people communicate by sharing information. His simple language, called Hyper Text Markup Language, allowed people to jump from one document to another with a simple click of a link. Initially introduced in 1993, the WWW grew exponentially every year. In 1998, in an article about the history of the web, Berners-Lee stated that part of the dream of the web was for it to be so generally used that it was a realistic mirror of the ways we work, play and socialize. While in 1998, Berners-Lee did not feel that had been accomplished, I think now, 12 years later it has. The web is such an integral part of our lives it is hard to imagine a time when we didn’t have it.

Although as varied and as useful as the Internet has been over the years, it still fills its primary goal in an excellent manner. Time after time in a disaster or crisis we hear about communications networks being shut down, but Internet messages get through. We’ve seen e-mail come out of earthquake zones, and bloggers operating in war zones. Personally, I always remember a story a friend of mine related. He works for New Jersey Transit and was in NYC on 9/11. He could not get a phone line or cell service that morning to call his wife and tell her he was ok. But he sent an e-mail to a friend and asked her to call his wife and relay that he was ok and the e-mail got through. For all the fun uses of the Internet, it accomplishes its main goal every day.

Websites referenced:
http://netvalley.com/intval1.html
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory
http://www.w3.org/History.html

and a lot from my head.