A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

1836: TELEGRAPH

Patented by Cooke and Wheatstone.

Revolutionized human (tele)communications.

Morse Code—a series of dots and dashes—was used to communicate between humans across a long distance.

Required telegraph wires throughout the country.

Though much slower, this was similar to how computers communicate via binary (0/1) data today.

1858-1866: TRANSATLANTIC CABLE

Allowed direct instantaneous communication across the Atlantic Ocean via telegraph.

Today, transatlantic telegraph cables have been replaced by transatlantic telecommunications cables.

1876: TELEPHONE

Exhibited by Alexander Graham Bell.

A telephone exchange or telephone switch is a system of electronic components that connects telephone calls.

The telephone exchange concept has been adapted for use in Internet exchanges.

1957: SPUTNIK

USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite.

The start of global telecommunications. Satellites play an important role in transmitting all sorts of data today.

In response, US forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.

1962–1968: PACKET-SWITCHING NETWORKS

The Internet relies on electrical “packets” to transfer data.

The origin is military: for utmost security in transferring information of networks.

Data is split into tiny packets that may take different routes to a destination.

PACKET-SWITCHING NETWORKS (CONT.)

Notice the distinctions between a centralized, decentralized, and distributed network.

Distributed networks:

Very hard to eavesdrop on messages.

More than one route available. If one route goes down, another may be followed.

Can withstand large scale destruction (such as nuclear attack—remember that this was the time of the Cold War).

1969: BIRTH OF THE INTERNET

ARPANET is commissioned by Dept. of Defense for research into networking.

First node developed at UCLA (Los Angeles) closely followed by nodes at Stanford Research Institute, UCSB (Santa Barbara) and U of Utah (4 Nodes).

The first transmission between two of these computers occurred in 1969, and one of the computers crashed a few characters in.

1971:BIRTH OF EMAIL

15 nodes (23 hosts) on ARPANET.

E-mail invented—a program to send messages across a distributed network.

E-mail is the main way of inter-personal communication on the Internet today.

1972: FIRST PUBLIC DEMONSTRATION

First public demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines.

Internetworking Working Group (INWG) created to address need for establishing agreed-upon protocols.

Telnet specification created—Telnet is still a relevant means of inter-machine connection today.

1973–1988: INTERNET GROWTH

Internet continues to grow exponentially, adding more hubs and more methods of data sharing.

1973: File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

1974: Transmission Control Program (TCP)

1979: Newsgroups & Multiuser Dungeons (MUD)

1984: Domain name servers (DNS)

1987: Commercial use of Internet (28,000 hosts)

1989: TIM BERNERS-LEE

Tim Berners-Lee of England (working at CERN in Switzerland) wrote a proposal in March for "a large hypertext database with typed links", but it generated little interest from his boss and others.

The following year, his boss suggested he work on it in his spare time.

1990: INVENTION OF THE WEB

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

A Web browser (which was also a Web editor)

A web server and HTTP server software

The first Web pages that described the project itself.

1991: WWW RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC

Initially non-graphic.

Revolutionized modern communications and our very way of life.

1993: THE GRAPHICAL WEB

Mosaic took the Internet by storm. It was a user-friendly web browser which allows the display of images.

Mosaic eventually led to Netscape browser.

2 million Internet hosts and 600 web sites in 1993.

1994: THE COMMERCIAL WEB

Shopping malls and banks arrived on the web.

3 million Internet hosts and 10,000 web sites.

Most websites are static—providing for no user interaction.

1996: THE MOBILE WEB

The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, launched in Finland.

To make efficient use of the small screen and tiny keypad, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP, based on HTML) was created for mobile devices.

Nowadays, mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets typically understand HTML and CSS.

2004: WEB 2.0

Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Publishing coins the term Web 2.0 to refer to cumulative changes in the way websites work: Interactivity Information sharing User-generated content Collaboration Photo and video sharing Blogging