4.0 A VERY brief History of the Internet
The Internet is a massive collaboration between countless parties the World over, and one that has only been made possible through the evolution of many technologies over nearly two centuries. The history of the Internet may be more incredible and involved than you think.
1836 : The telegraph was introduced, revolutionising long-distance communication. Believe it or not, this is where it all started.
1858-1866 : The transatlantic cable was laid, allowing instantaneous communication across the atlantic. Cables still connect the continents today and remain a main hub of telecommunications, with new connections being laid all the time.
1876 : Alexander Graham Bell exhibited the telephone. Telephones exchanges provide the backbone of Internet connections today.
1957 : The USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth, marking the start of global telecommunications. In response, the US formed ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) within the US Department of Defense to establish their lead in military science and technology.
1962-1968 : The military developed PS (packet-switching) for security in transferring information between networks (data is split into packets that can take different routes to a destination, making them harder to spy on and ensuring that if one route goes down another may be used instead). The Internet today relies on packets to transfer data.
1969 : Surprisingly, this year marked the true birth of the Internet because ARPANET was commissioned by the US Department of Defense for research into networking.
1971 : People were communicating over the ARPANET network, and email was invented.
1973 : Global Networking became a reality when the first international connections were made to ARPANET. Ethernet was outlined (how local networks connect today) and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was specified (how computers send and receive data).
1974 : (Internet) Transmission Control Program (TCP) was specified.
1976 : UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) was developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX (UNIX is still the main operating system of choice). Machines could now "talk" over a network.
1982 : The US Department of Defense declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking. TCP/IP defined the future of network communication.
1984 : The Internet continued to grow and Domain Name Servers (DNS) were introduced (domain names are easier to remember than a series of numbers).
1987 : The commercialisation of the Internet was born. The NSF (National Science Foundation) oversaw the Internet's transition from government to private operation, allowing commercial access.
1989 : The very first public dial-up Internet service provider (ISP) came on-line, called The World (world.std.com).
1990 : The Internet continued to expand but ARPANET was retired. Most university computers connected to it were moved to networks connected to the NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network). Archie was invented (archives without the v), the first tool for searching the Internet. This program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of filenames.
1991 : The first web browser, WorldWideWeb (WWW), was released by CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). Originally developed to share documents accross the physics community, it provided access to information anywhere in the world (non-graphical initially). According to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, "The Internet is a network of networks. Basically it is made from computers and cables...The Web is an abstract imaginary space of information. On the Net, you find computers; on the Web, you find documents, sounds, videos...information. On the Net, the connections are cables between computers; on the Web, connections are hypertext links. The Web exists because of programs which communicate between computers on the Net. The Web could not be without the Net. The Web made the Net useful because people are really interested in information and don't really want to have to know about computers and cables."
So almost 2 decades after the birth of the Internet, the World Wide Web was built on its backbone to allow the public exchange of information on a global basis. That same year, Gopher was released, a text-based interface to access internet resources (removing the need to remember complex computer commands). While Archie indexed computer files, Gopher indexed plain text documents. As these were text files, most of the Gopher sites became Web sites after the creation of the World Wide Web.
1992 : The term "Surfing the Internet" was coined by Jean Armour Polly.
1993 : The media began to take notice of the Internet. Mosaic was released and became very popular, a user-friendly graphical front end to the world Wide Web - the first widely used web browser. This developed into the first commercial web browser, Netscape Navigator, one of the most popular web browsers to date (later renamed Communicator, then back to Netscape, and ultimately developed into Mozilla). The first web robot, called World Wide Web Wanderer, was created. Running monthly, this was used initially for counting Web servers (to measure the size of the Web) and later to obtain URLs, forming the first database of Web sites called Wandex. ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web) was released also, which allowed users to submit their own pages to be indexed.
1994 : Commercialisation took off. Banks and businesses started using the Internet (even pizzas could be ordered online in the US). The following year the registration of domain names no longer remained free. Search engines became more sophisticated. Yahoo was launched, offering page descriptions in adition to URLs, and later that year, WebCrawler was introduced, indexing entire page texts for the first time. The same year, Lycos introduced relevance retrieval, prefix matching, and word proximity. The Opera browser was developed, and released commercially 2 years later.
1995 : Alta Vista began, the first search engine to allow natural language inquires and advanced searching techniques. It also provided a search option for photos, music, and videos. Microsoft released Windows 95 (their operating system), which included a Web browser called Internet Explorer, soon to become the leading web browser.
1997 : AskJeeves (later just Ask then AskJeeves again!) and Google were launched. Google used inbound links to help rank sites in order of importance.
1998 : MSN Search and the Open Directory were started (dmoz). The latter seeked to become the definitive catalog of the Web, with the entire directory being maintained by volunteer human editors.