History of modern communication medium - the Internet

What is Internet?

Today, the Internet word is very common among us. It not only link between two people but also creates a highway of world information. With the help of Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP), the Internet creates an interconnected computer network globally. The network consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope and linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet provides you the service which helps you to get information, access data, communicate with others, shop, play games and many more. This mess of huge network doesn't build in one day or in one year. The modern Internet is the implementation of many technology, logic and years of R&D.

So, from where this modern Internet came? Let’s take a look at the long journey of the Internet.

Ancient period of the Internet

Invention of ARPANET

In 7th February 1958, the Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy was signed Department of Defense Directive 5105.15 and his signature launched the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is known today as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This creation of the agency is lead to the creation of the Internet. The Cold War was in full swing in the 1950s, and the US was worried about the Soviet Union’s growing scientific prowess. Because the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred the U.S. Defense Department to consider ways information could still be disseminated even after a nuclear attack. The existing national defense network relied on telephone lines and wires that were susceptible to damage. This eventually led to the formation of the ARPANET. In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider, a scientist from ARPA and MIT, suggested the ARPANET. And this network initially connected with four major computers that are UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah at universities in the southwestern US.

ARPANET to NSFNET

In July 1975, the network had been turned over to the Defense Communications Agency, also part of the Department of Defense. In 1983, the U.S. military portion of the ARPANET was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET and adopted the Transmission Control Protocol. In 1985, the engineers designed it to connect university computer science departments across the US and launched it as the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET). NSFNET took on the role of internet backbone across the US when five supercomputing centers across the US, connecting researchers to regional networks, and then on to nearly 200 subsidiary networks.

Rise of the modern Internet

Invention of HTTP

The year of 1989 is taken a major step forward in internet communications. Tim Berners-Lee, the Independent Contractor of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), created the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) which gave diverse computer platforms the ability to access the same internet. Berners-Lee is widely regarded as the father of the World Wide Web (WWW).

In 1991, WWW is available for public use over the Internet that has loads of information in various fields. Jean Armour Polly was firstly surfing the Internet and net surfing was coined by Brendan Kehoe in a USENET post. Audio and video multicast also came into existence.

First Website

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. The first website was launched in 1994 by White house named as www.whitehouse.gov and then many other commercial websites were launched. In 1998, Google opens its first office in California and web publishing tools were introduced.

The internet provider model created network access points as a profitable and commercial side of the internet.

Today’s Internet

Today, the Internet is a widespread information infrastructure and used by over 3.2 billion people across the globe. The Internet has become accessible by the non-technical communities with the help social networking sites. It provides services for the people of all ages to communicate and share their interests in many more ways. The smaller devices are also capable to connect to the Internet. Tablets, smartphones, ebooks, game machines, wristwatches, and GPS devices are now capable of tapping into the web. Soon, Internet will contain everything around us in form of IoT device which is already started. In future, we can’t live without Internet similar to water.