Home : Week 4 : A (Very) Brief History of The Internet
The Internet is a worldwide network of computer networks. A "Network" is two or more computers (called "nodes" on a network) connected together in order to share information and resources. The internet is a very special type of network for two reasons:
1. Its size. The Internet connects 9.5 million hosts or computers as of 1996 (source)
2. It is standardized. All computers, Mac, PC, UNIX, Palm Pilot, or any thing else uses the same languages (protocols) and tools (TCP/IP) to connect and communicate over the Internet
So, with any old computer you scrounge up, you could connect to the millions of other computers on the Internet, because they all speak the same language.
Surprise, it was the government. In 1969 an agency of the United States Department of Defense, known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency, began research on robust nationwide information networks that could withstand wars or natural disasters. This network was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). ARPANET was designed so that it could function even if several sites supporting the network were destroyed in war or natural disaster.
The ARPANET was eventually divided into the strictly military Milnet, and a
new ARPANET which connected mainly universities. A new communication language
was created so that members of both networks could communicate. These protocols
became known as TCP/IP.
New networks were created (like the National Science Foundation's NSFNET) which
also used the TCP/IP protocols. With a common language, networks could then talk
to other networks, making possible the enormous Internet we know and love today.
(source)
Since mostly universities and research institutions were using these networks, they got into the habit making their information, documents, and software available to all for free. This spirit of open information exchange still exists on the Internet in the form of free content (you have to pay for a newspaper) and lots of free software (Netscape and Internet Explorer are both free, if you want to take the time to download them). This wealth of free information and software attracted more people. As personal computers became cheaper and more powerful, and also became equipped with high speed modems, more individuals could access the Internet with a computer and regular telephone lines. As demand for these services increased, businesses, institutions, and individuals pressured the U.S. government funded Internet to open its doors to unrestricted traffic. Which they did in the early 1990s.
The content of the Internet at this point was mostly plain text information about academic subjects. No pictures, no music, no cartoons. Aside from being boring, it was also very difficult to use and very disorganized. Not many 'normal' people had the knowledge or interest to dig through countless boring text files to find some boring academic paper.
Around the same time the Internet opened for business, physicists at CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory) created and released an authoring language and distribution system called Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. HTML could integrate text, pictures, and multimedia right inside one document. HTML also included linking, so one document could be connected to another document anywhere.
Then when students and faculty at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (NCSA, the fine people who brought
you "Telnet") invented an easy to use web browser called "Mosaic"
and gave it away for free, millions started surfing the web for cool stuff.
(Source: HTML & XHTML. The Definitive Guide. Chuck Musicano,
Bill Kennedy. O'Reilly & Associates,
Inc. Sebastopol, CA 95472)
Those bright lads who came up Mosaic went on to create the Netscape company and web browser and make a gajillion dollars. America Online followed soon after. With hundreds of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) cropping up all the time, and lots of media and business interest, the Internet blew up big in the mid 1990s.