History 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).

Packet switching networks such as ARPANET, NPL network, CYCLADES,Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols. Donald Davies was the first to put theory into practice by designing a packet-switched network at the National Physics Laboratory in the UK, the first of its kind in the world and the cornerstone for UK research for almost two decades.^[1][2] Following, ARPANET further 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 very late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990,^[3] and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

In the 1980s, the work of Tim Berners-Lee in the United Kingdom, on theWorld Wide Web, theorised the fact that protocols link hypertext documents into a working system,^[4] marking the beginning of the modern Internet. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, andNational LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.^[5] Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.

(source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet)

Timelines of the INTERNET HISTORY

Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the Internet has no single “inventor.” Instead, it has evolved over time. The Internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and share data with one another. Today, we use the Internet for almost everything, and for many people it would be impossible to imagine life without it.

THE SPUTNIK SCARE

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first manmade satellite into orbit. The satellite, known as Sputnik, did not do much: It tumbled aimlessly around in outer space, sending blips and bleeps from its radio transmitters as it circled the Earth. Still, to many Americans, the beach-ball-sized Sputnik was proof of something alarming: While the brightest scientists and engineers in the United States had been designing bigger cars and better television sets, it seemed, the Soviets had been focusing on less frivolous things—and they were going to win the Cold War because of it.

After Sputnik’s launch, many Americans began to think more seriously about science and technology. Schools added courses on subjects like chemistry, physics and calculus. Corporations took government grants and invested them in scientific research and development. And the federal government itself formed new agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age technologies such as rockets, weapons and computers.

THE BIRTH OF THE ARPANET

Scientists and military experts were especially concerned about what might happen in the event of a Soviet attack on the nation’s telephone system. Just one missile, they feared, could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible. In 1962, a scientist from M.I.T. and ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider proposed a solution to this problem: a “galactic network” of computers that could talk to one another. Such a network would enable government leaders to communicate even if the Soviets destroyed the telephone system.

In 1965, another M.I.T. scientist developed a way of sending information from one computer to another that he called “packet switching.” Packet switching breaks data down into blocks, or packets, before sending it to its destination. That way, each packet can take its own route from place to place. Without packet switching, the government’s computer network—now known as the ARPAnet—would have been just as vulnerable to enemy attacks as the phone system.

“LOGIN”

In 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first message: a “node-to-node” communication from one computer to another. (The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one was the size of a small house.) The message—“LOGIN”—was short and simple, but it crashed the fledgling ARPA network anyway: The Stanford computer only received the note’s first two letters.

THE NETWORK GROWS

By the end of 1969, just four computers were connected to the ARPAnet, but the network grew steadily during the 1970s. In 1971, it added the University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet, and two years later it added networks at London’s University College and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. As packet-switched computer networks multiplied, however, it became more difficult for them to integrate into a single worldwide “Internet.”

By the end of the 1970s, a computer scientist named Vinton Cerf had begun to solve this problem by developing a way for all of the computers on all of the world’s mini-networks to communicate with one another. He called his invention “Transmission Control Protocol,” or TCP. (Later, he added an additional protocol, known as “Internet Protocol.” The acronym we use to refer to these today is TCP/IP.) One writer describes Cerf’s protocol as “the ‘handshake’ that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space.”

THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Cerf’s protocol transformed the Internet into a worldwide network. Throughout the 1980s, researchers and scientists used it to send files and data from one computer to another. However, in 1991 the Internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an Internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Since then, the Internet has changed in many ways. In 1992, a group of students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed a sophisticated browser that they called Mosaic. (It later became Netscape.) Mosaic offered a user-friendly way to search the Web: It allowed users to see words and pictures on the same page for the first time and to navigate using scrollbars and clickable links. That same year, Congress decided that the Web could be used for commercial purposes. As a result, companies of all kinds hurried to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use the Internet to sell goods directly to customers. More recently, social networking sites like Facebook have become a popular way for people of all ages to stay connected. (source: www.history.com/topics/inventions/invention-of-the-internet)

1969

·         A connection is made between The University of California Los Angeles and The Stanford Research Institute - Arpanet is born; created by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA)

1971

·         The first virus - Creeper - created

1973

·         Arpanet users 35

1976

·         Apple founded

1978

·         400 Arpanet users receive the first ever spam email inviting them to a product demo

·         US National Science Foundation creates a non-military network for American universities

1979

·         Arpanet user Kevin Mackenzie uses the emoticon -)

1980

·         Apple IPO - market cap £1.7bn

1981

·         Arpanet and all network users

·         IBM launches the personal computer

1982

·         The Elk Cloner virus created

·         Scottt Fahlman, computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University - adds a colon to the first online emoticon :-)

1986

·         The US National Science Foundation created a network to link existing university supercomputer networks

·         Microsoft IPO - market cap $770m

1987

·         Stoned virus created

1988

·         The first worm - "Morris" - created

1990

·         "Archie" the first search engine created by a student

·         Arpanet decomissioned

1991

·         Tim Lee at CERN introduces the World Wide Web

1992

·         Michelangelo virus created

1993

·         Mosaic web browser launched

1994

·         Webcrawler, go.com and Lycos search engines launched

·         Yahoo! founded

1995

·         Microsoft launches Internet Explorer.  Amazon and eBay founded

·         18,957 websites are live

1997

·         AOL launches instant messenger

1998

·         Worldwide internet users breaks the 100m figure

·         Google founded

1999

·         Worldwide fears of computer crashes over Y2K or Millennium Bug

·         Zappos - the first online only shop - is launched.  Napster founded

·         Happy99 - first email virus created

2000

·         iloveyou virus - 50 million users report being infected within 10 days

2001

·         Napster ordered to stop users sharing copyrighted music

·         Wikipedia launches. Apple launches the ipod.

·         CodeRed - the first virus to spread without human interaction

2002

·         Friendster founded. Gawker founded

2003

·         Apple launches iTunes and Safari browser. Myspace, Linkedin, Skype and WordPress launched

2004

·         Google's IPO - market cap £23bn. Facebook, Flickr and Vimeo launch. Mozilla launches Firefox browser

2005

·         Worldwide internet users breaks the 1 BILLION

·         Reddit and YouTube launch

·         Cabir - the first mobile virus created

2006

·         Twitter launched. Google buys YouTube for $1.65bn

2007

·         Apple launches iPhone. Tumblr launched. BBC launches the iPlayer

2008

·         Facebook becomes the world's most popular social network

·         Google launched Chrome. Spotify launched. Apple launched App Store

2010

·         Apple launches iPad. Instagram and Pinterest launched

·         Stuxnet virus targets industrial processes - and appears to target nuclear operations in Iran

2011

·         Death of Steve Jobs. Google+ launched. Microsoft buys Skype

2012

·         Worldwide internet users breaks 2.4 BILLION