Download NAME: NWOSU JENNIFER CHIMENKA COLLEGE: MEDICINE AND

NAME: NWOSU JENNIFER CHIMENKA
COLLEGE: MEDICINE AND HEALTH SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT: MEDICINE AND SURGERY
DATE: 05/12/2014
QUESTION: TRACE THE ORIGIN OF THE INTERNET
Origin of the Internet
The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s.
Initial concepts of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in
the United States, Great Britain, and France. The US Department of Defense awarded
contracts as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the
ARPANET (which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol.) The first
message was sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock's
laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at
Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was one of the world's first
operational packet switching networks, the first network to implement TCP/IP, and one of
the progenitors of what was to become the global Internet. The network was initially funded
by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA) within the U.S. Department
of Defense for use by its projects at universities and research laboratories in the US. The
packet switching of the ARPANET, together with TCP/IP, would form the backbone of how the
Internet works. The packet switching was based on concepts and designs by American
engineer Paul Baran, Welsh scientist Donald Davies and Lawrence Roberts of the Lincoln
Laboratory. The TCP/IP communication protocols were developed for ARPANET by computer
scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, and also incorporated some designs from Louis
Pouzin. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking,
in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.
Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science
Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet
protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the
ARPANET. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national
supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with
the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the
United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service
providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in
1990. Private connections to the Internet by commercial entities became widespread
quickly, and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on
the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic. The Internet, then known as
ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at
universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the
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. were added. By January 1971, Stanford,
MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U were added. In
months to come, NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and the U of Illinois plugged in.
After that, there were far too many to keep listing here.
The Internet was designed to provide a communications network that would work even if
some of the major sites were down. 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, scientists, and librarians. There was nothing friendly
about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who
used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to
learn to use a very complex system.
Since the Internet was initially funded by the government, it was originally limited to
research, education, and government uses. Commercial uses were prohibited unless they
directly served the goals of research and education. This policy continued until the early
90's, when independent commercial networks began to grow. It then became possible to
route traffic across the country from one commercial site to another without passing
through the government funded NSFNet Internet backbone.
Delphi was the first national commercial online service to offer Internet access to its
subscribers. It opened up an email connection in July 1992 and full Internet service in
November 1992. All pretenses of limitations 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 by this time and educational institutions had
been paying their own way for some time, the loss of NSF funding had no appreciable effect
on cost.
As the Internet has become ubiquitous, faster, and increasingly accessible to nontechnical communities, social networking and collaborative services have grown rapidly,
enabling people to communicate and share interests in many more ways. Sites like
Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, delicious, blogs, wikis, and
many more let people of all ages rapidly share their interests of the moment with others
everywhere.