The invention of the internet took nearly 50 years and the hard work of countless individuals. Here's a snapshot of how we got to where we are today:. When most of us think of the early years of the internet, we tend to think of the s. But this period was when the internet went mainstream, not when it was invented. In reality, the internet had been in development since the s, although its early form was a mere shell of what it would eventually become. For the internet to become popular, we first needed computers, and while the first computers date back to the 17th and even the 16th century, the first digital, programmable computers broke onto the scene in the s.
Throughout the s, computer scientists began connecting computers in the same building, giving birth to Local Area Networks LANs. However, it wasn't until that J. Eventually, the idea of a "galactic network" became known as a Wide Area Network, and the race to create this network became the race to create the internet.
Because of how closely this idea resembles the internet today, some have chosen to name Licklidler as the "father of the internet," although the actual creation and implementation of this network resulted from the hard work of many hundreds if not thousands of people.
To build the internet, researchers were working on ways to connect computers and also make them communicate with one another, and in , MIT researcher Lawrence Roberts and Thomas Merrill connected a computer in Massachusetts to one in California using a low-speed dial-up telephone line.
However, while the two men were able to make the computers talk to one another, it was immediately obvious that the telephone system used at the time was not capable of reliably handling communications between two computers, confirming the need to develop a technology known as packet switching to facilitate a faster and more reliable transmission of data.
Shortly thereafter, also in , computers at the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara were added to the network.
Over time, the ARPAnet would grow, and it served as the foundation for the internet we have today. Also, Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of the National Physics Laboratory NPL in the United Kingdom were developing a similar network based on packet switching, and there were countless other versions of the internet in development in various research labs around the world.
In the end, the combined work of these researchers helped produce the first versions of the internet. Throughout the rest of the s and into the early s, different academic communities and research disciplines, desiring to have better communication amongst their members, developed their own computer networks. This meant the internet was not only growing, but that there were also countless versions of the internet that existed independently of one another. The introduction of this concept was the first time the word "internet" was used.
It was shorthand for the word "internetworking," which reflects the internet's initial purpose: to connect multiple computer networks. This means that any machine could communicate with any other machine regardless of which network it belonged to.
This made it possible for many more machines to connect with one another, allowing for the growth of networks which much more closely resemble the internet we have today.
However, from that point on the ARPAnet became less and less significant until it was officially decommissioned in However, for this to happen, massive coordination was needed to ensure the many different parties working to develop the internet were on the same page and working towards the same goal.
The first step in this process was to turn the responsibility of managing the development of the internet over to a different government agency. In the U. This backbone was designed to connect the various supercomputers across the United States and to support the internet needs of the higher education community. However, at this point, the internet was only available to a small community of users, mainly those in the government and academic research community.
But the value of the internet was too great, and this exclusivity was set to change. By the late s, several private computer networks had emerged for commercial purposes that mainly provided electronic mail services, which, at the time, were the primary appeal of the internet.
Then, in , U. Congress passed expanding access to the NSFNET , making it significantly easier for commercial networks to connect with those already in use by the government and academic community.
Instead, commercial access points and exchanges became the key components of the now near-global internet infrastructure.
Berners-Lee also invented the first Web Browser, called WorldWideWeb, and many others emerged shortly thereafter, the most famous being Mosaic , which launched in and later became Netscape. The release of the Mosaic browser in caused a major spike in the number of internet users, largely because it allowed people to access the internet from their normal home or office computers, which were also becoming mainstream around this time.
In , the founder of Mosaic launched Netscape Navigator , which, along with Microsoft Internet Explorer, was the first truly mainstream web browser. The subsequent Browser Wars , which resulted in the failure of Netscape and the triumph of Microsoft, made Netscape one of the many early internet players to rise quickly and fall just as fast.
Many use this story to demonstrate the ruthlessness of Bill Gates' business practices, but no matter what you think of the guy, this "war" between Netscape and Microsoft helped shape the early days of the internet. Apart from making it easier for anyone to access the internet from any machine, another reason browsers and the World Wide Web were so important to the growth of the internet was that they allowed for the transfer of not only text but also images.
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In , MIT computer scientist J. Licklider comes up with the idea for a global computer network. He later shares his idea with colleagues at the U. In , Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf collaborate to develop a protocol for linking multiple networks together. While working at Xerox, Robert Metcalfe develops a system using cables that allows for transfer of more data over a network. He names this system Alto Aloha, but it later becomes known as Ethernet.
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