The History of the Internet

The origin of the Internet dates back to July, 1968 where a request for quotation was sent out to build components for a new computerized network by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). On October 29, 1969, the first host to host connection was made between two network nodes, one at the University of California (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

A network of computers was developed by the U.S Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Each computer was given an exclusive address and could communicate with another computer, by its identifying address. The purpose of the new network called the “ARPANET” was for researchers, academics and military personnel to communicate and share research with each other. Commercial use was entirely restricted until 1994.

The data was transmitted across the network by packet switching where data is broken into smaller segments called “packets” and the packets are disassembled, transmitted individually in a stream and then reassembled when they reach the destination. Packet switching was being developed in 1964. As the computers during the late 1960's and early 1970's had no common platform and used different technologies, a standard set of protocols called Transmission Control Protocol was developed. A protocol is a set of special rules that telecommunication connections use in order to communicate from a sending to a receiving point. Each end point that had the set of protocols installed, as they exist at different levels including both hardware and software, was able to understand the contents of a data transmission. Although different types of computers existed, any computer that contained the protocols could transmit data to another. In 1978, TCP was split into two protocols, TCP and Internet Protocol, which are commonly known as TCP/IP. This was declared in 1983 to become the standard used for network communications.

As of December 1969, The University in California (UCLA), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah were the first four hosts connected to the ARPANET by an Interface Message Processor (IMP), which was a Honeywell DDP-516 mini computer with 12K of memory. Provided by AT&T, the line speed was 50 Kbps.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was developed in 1963, in which 128, 7- bit strings made up of different combinations of zeros and ones that represent each letter of the alphabet, punctuation marks, symbols etc. Email and the “@” symbol (user@host), in addresses were introduced in 1971. Remote access using “Telenet” (a public packet switching service) was developed in 1974. Multiple person chat sessions were introduced in 1973 and that same year users could download files through a file transfer protocol (FTP). Ethernet for connecting local area networks (LAN's) was being developed by Xerox. Email became the preferred method of communicating in which email comprised of 75% of all ARPANET traffic. By 1975, average daily traffic exceeded three million packets per day with sixty-one computers connected.

In 1977, new computers were announced including the Tandy TRS-80, Commodore Pet and the Apple II computer. Microsoft developed DOS, a disk operating system which was selected by IBM in 1980, to operate the IBM PC that was launched for sale in August, 1981. Japan started to mass produce inexpensive 64kb micro-computer chips creating a highly competitive environment for North American chip manufacturers. The backbone software for Novell networking was created in 1982 from a computer software game. Coaxial cabling used for connecting micro-computers to mainframes was introduced for sale the same year.

The Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced in 1984 as the ARPANET was split into two parts the previous year. The ARPANET remained for public users and the MILNET for military and defence users. Some of the first domain names registered was bbn.com, mit.edu, css.gov, .uk. Hosts registered using either .gov, .edu, .org, .net, .com or two letters to indicate a country. Ethernet was commercialized and Sun Microsystems introduced a workstation with built in networking capability and the Unix operating system that included TCP/IP. In January 1984, Apple Inc. announced the Apple Macintosh computer with a unique, user friendly interface. Compaq Computers introduced its' first personal computer in 1985.

By 1985, there were two thousand users on all networks. By the end of 1987 there were nearly thirty thousand users as the NSFNET was created to replace the ARPANET with a backbone speed of 56Kbps. Five supercomputer centres hosted the network and by 1988 the backbone speed was upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps) and again to T3 (44.736Mbps) in 1991. The first worm infected six thousand out of sixty thousand hosts (The Morris WORM) on the network in 1988.

CA*net was formed in Canada in 1990 by linking twenty regional networks as a national Internet backbone in order to connect directly with the NSFNET. The internet backbone is a communications system in which the foundation is a fibre optic cable system that centrally connects a section of the Internet network. Tim Berners Lee a developer for The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol language (HTTP) system that is able run on different operating systems. It is a set of rules that enables the exchange of hypertext files including text, graphics, sound and video. CERN launched the first web server in November, 1990. The world wide web “www” was released in 1991 and the number of hosts rose to 1.1 million within one year.

As of 2010, the global Internet population online is 1.83 billion and is expected to grow to 2.10 billion by 2012. These figures were gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency’s WorldFactbook.