Download A Brief History of the Internet

A B RIEF H ISTORY OF THE
I NTERNET
1836: T ELEGRAPH

Patented by Cooke and Wheatstone.

Revolutionized human (tele)communications.

Morse Code—a series of dots and dashes—was
used to communicate between humans across a
long distance.

Required telegraph wires throughout the
country.

Though much slower, this was similar to how
computers communicate via binary (0/1) data
today.
1858-1866:
T RANSATLANTIC C ABLE

Allowed direct instantaneous communication
across the Atlantic Ocean via telegraph.

Today, transatlantic telegraph cables have been
replaced by transatlantic telecommunications
cables.
1876: T ELEPHONE

Exhibited by Alexander Graham Bell.

A telephone exchange or telephone switch is a
system of electronic components that connects
telephone calls.

The telephone exchange concept has been
adapted for use in Internet exchanges.
1957: S PUTNIK

USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth
satellite.

The start of global telecommunications. Satellites
play an important role in transmitting all sorts of
data today.

In response, US forms the Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department
of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science
and technology applicable to the military.
1962–1968: PACKET SWITCHING NETWORKS

The Internet relies on electrical “packets” to
transfer data.

The origin is military: for utmost security in
transferring information of networks.

Data is split into tiny packets that may take
different routes to a destination.
PACKET - SWITCHING
NETWORKS (C ONT.)

Notice the distinctions between a centralized,
decentralized, and distributed network.

Distributed networks:

Very hard to eavesdrop on messages.

More than one route available. If one route goes
down, another may be followed.

Can withstand large scale destruction (such as
nuclear attack—remember that this was the time
of the Cold War).
1969:
B IRTH OF THE I NTERNET

ARPANET is commissioned by Dept. of Defense
for research into networking.

First node developed at UCLA (Los Angeles)
closely followed by nodes at Stanford Research
Institute, UCSB (Santa Barbara) and U of Utah (4
Nodes).

The first transmission between two of these
computers occurred in 1969, and one of the
computers crashed a few characters in.
1971:
B IRTH OF E MAIL

15 nodes (23 hosts) on ARPANET.

E-mail invented—a program to send messages
across a distributed network.

E-mail is the main way of inter-personal
communication on the Internet today.
1972: F IRST P UBLIC
D EMONSTRATION

First public demonstration of ARPANET between
40 machines.

Internetworking Working Group (INWG) created
to address need for establishing agreed-upon
protocols.

Telnet specification created—Telnet is still a
relevant means of inter-machine connection
today.
1973–1988:
I NTERNET G ROWTH

Internet continues to grow exponentially, adding
more hubs and more methods of data sharing.

1973: File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

1974: Transmission Control Program (TCP)

1979: Newsgroups & Multiuser Dungeons (MUD)

1984: Domain name servers (DNS)

1987: Commercial use of Internet (28,000 hosts)
1989: T IM B ERNERS -L EE

Tim Berners-Lee of England (working at CERN in
Switzerland) wrote a proposal in March for "a
large hypertext database with typed links", but it
generated little interest from his boss and others.

The following year, his boss suggested he work
on it in his spare time.
1990:
I NVENTION OF THE W EB

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the
tools necessary for a working Web:

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

A Web browser (which was also a Web editor)

A web server and HTTP server software

The first Web pages that described the project
itself.
1991: WWW R ELEASED TO
THE P UBLIC

Initially non-graphic.

Revolutionized modern communications and our
very way of life.
1993: T HE G RAPHICAL W EB

Mosaic took the Internet by storm. It was a userfriendly web browser which allows the display of
images.

Mosaic eventually led to Netscape browser.

2 million Internet hosts and 600 web sites in
1993.
1994:
T HE C OMMERCIAL W EB

Shopping malls and banks arrived on the web.

3 million Internet hosts and 10,000 web sites.

Most websites are static—providing for no user
interaction.
1996:
T HE M OBILE W EB

The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity
was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, launched in
Finland.

To make efficient use of the small screen and tiny
keypad, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP,
based on HTML) was created for mobile devices.

Nowadays, mobile devices such as smart phones
and tablets typically understand HTML and CSS.
2004:
W EB 2.0

Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Publishing coins the term
Web 2.0 to refer to cumulative changes in the
way websites work:






Interactivity
Information sharing
User-generated content
Collaboration
Photo and video sharing
Blogging