History of Internet

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s, just as much potential value in allowing computers to exchange information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which will form the basis for Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 than dial-up telephone lines. It showed the possibility of Wide Area Networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visions and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet.

Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract easily by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers to universities in the southwestern U.S. (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB and University of Utah). The contract was carried out by BBN of Cambridge, MA under Bob Kahn and went online in December 1969. By June 1970, MIT, Harvard, BBN, and Systems Development Corp. (SDC) in Santa Monica, Cal. was added. In January 1971, Stanford MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U added. In the coming months, sat NASA / Ames, Miter, Burroughs, RAND, and U of Illinois in. After that there were too many to keep the list here. 

The Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that will work, although some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attacks. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes. 

The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, researchers and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it for a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to learn to use a very complex system. 

The Internet matured in the 70s as a result of the TCP / IP architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further developed by Kahn and Vint Cerf at Stanford and others throughout the 70's. It was adopted by the Ministry of Defense in 1980 replaces the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP) and universally adopted by 1983. 

In 1986, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet. They maintained their sponsorship for nearly a decade, setting rules for its non-commercial government and research applications. 

As commands to email, FTP and telnet were standardized, it was a lot easier for nontechnical people to learn to use tools. It was not easy by today's standards by any means, but it did open up use of the Internet to many more people in universities in particular. Other departments in addition to the libraries, computing, physics and engineering departments found ways to make good use of nets - to communicate with colleagues around the world and to share files and resources. 

While the number of websites on the Internet was small, it was relatively easy to keep track of the resources that are of interest, which was available. But as more and more universities and organizations - and their libraries - connected, the Internet became harder and harder to trace. There was more and more need for tools to index the resources available. 

The first attempt, apart from library catalogs, to index the Internet was created in 1989 when Peter Deutsch and his crew at McGill University in Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which they named Archie. This software would periodically reach out to all known openly available ftp sites, list their files, and build a searchable index of software. The commands to search Archie were UNIX commands, and it took some knowledge of Unix to use it to its full capacity. 

McGill University, which hosted the first Archie, found out one day that half of all Internet traffic going into Canada from the United States had access Archie. Administrators were concerned that the University was subsidizing such a volume of traffic and closed Archie to outside access. Fortunately, that time there were many more files available. 

The Internet was initially funded by the government, it was initially limited to research, education and government users. Commercial uses were prohibited unless they directly served targets for research and education. This policy continued until the early 90s, when independent commercial networks began to grow. Then it became possible to route traffic across the country from a commercial site to another without passing the state-funded NSFNet Internet backbone. 

Delphi was the first national commercial online service to offer Internet access to its subscribers. It opened an e-mail connection in July 1992 and full Internet service in November 1992. All conditions for restrictions on commercial use disappeared in May 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone, and all traffic relied on commercial networks. AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online. Since commercial usage was so widespread at this time and educational institutions have paid their own way for some time, loss of NSF funding had no appreciable effect on costs. 

Microsoft's full scale in the browser, server and Internet Service Provider market completed the major shift over to a commercially based Internet. The release of Windows 98 in June 1998 with the Microsoft browser well integrated into the desktop shows Bill Gates' willingness to exploit the huge growth of the Internet. Microsoft's success over the past few years have brought a challenge to their dominance. We will leave it up to you whether you think these matches will be played in the courts or the marketplace. 

During this period of tremendous growth in business Internet arena scrambled to find economic models that work. Free services supported by advertising shifted some of the direct costs away from the consumer - temporarily. Services such as Delphi offered free web pages, chat rooms and bulletin boards for community building. Online sales have grown rapidly for such products as books and music CDs and computers, but profit margins are slim when price comparisons are so easy, and public confidence in online security is still uncertain. Business models that have worked well are portal that tries to give everything to everyone and live auctions. AOL's acquisition of Time-Warner was the largest merger in history, where it occurred, and demonstrates the huge growth in Internet business! The stock market has had a rocky ride, swooping up and down as new technology enterprises, as dotcom encountered good news and bad. The decline in advertising income spelled doom for many dotcoms, and a major shakeout and search for better business models were made by the survivors.

A current trend with major implications for the future is the growth of high-speed connections. 56K modems and the providers who supported them very dispersed in a while, but it is the low end now. 56K is not fast enough to carry multimedia such as audio and video, except in low quality. But new technologies many times faster, such as cable modem and Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) are predominant now. 

Wireless has grown rapidly over the last few years, and travelers search for Wi-Fi "hot spots" where they can connect while they are away from home or office. Many airports, cafes, hotels and motels now routinely provide these services, some for a fee and some free.