History of the Internet

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The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.[1][2][3]

Computer science was an emerging discipline in the late 1950s that began to consider time-sharing between computer users, and later, the possibility of achieving this over wide area networks. J. C. R. Licklider developed the idea of a universal network at the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Independently, Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation proposed a distributed network based on data in message blocks in the early 1960s, and Donald Davies conceived of packet switching in 1965 at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), proposing a national commercial data network in the United Kingdom.

ARPA awarded contracts in 1969 for the development of the ARPANET project, directed by Robert Taylor and managed by Lawrence Roberts. ARPANET adopted the packet switching technology proposed by Davies and Baran. The network of Interface Message Processors (IMPs) was built by a team at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, with the design and specification led by Bob Kahn. The host-to-host protocol was specified by a group of graduate students at UCLA, led by Steve Crocker, along with Jon Postel and others. The ARPANET expanded rapidly across the United States with connections to the United Kingdom and Norway.

Several early packet-switched networks emerged in the 1970s which researched and provided data networking. Louis Pouzin and Hubert Zimmermann pioneered a simplified end-to-end approach to internetworking at the IRIA. Peter Kirstein put internetworking into practice at University College London in 1973. Bob Metcalfe developed the theory behind Ethernet and the PARC Universal Packet. ARPA initiatives and the International Network Working Group developed and refined ideas for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. Vint Cerf, now at Stanford University, and Bob Kahn, now at DARPA, published their research on internetworking in 1974. Through the Internet Experiment Note series and later RFCs this evolved into the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), two protocols of the Internet protocol suite. The design included concepts pioneered in the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin. The development of packet switching networks was underpinned by mathematical work in the 1970s by Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA.

In the late 1970s, national and international public data networks emerged based on the X.25 protocol, designed by Rémi Després and others. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded national supercomputing centers at several universities in the United States, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, thus creating network access to these supercomputer sites for research and academic organizations in the United States. International connections to NSFNET, the emergence of architecture such as the Domain Name System, and the adoption of TCP/IP on existing networks in the United States and around the world marked the beginnings of the Internet.[4][5][6] Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia.[7] Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990.[8] The optical backbone of the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic, as traffic transitioned to optical networks managed by Sprint, MCI and AT&T in the United States.

Research at CERN in Switzerland by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989–90 resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network.[9] The dramatic expansion of the capacity of the Internet, enabled by the advent of wave division multiplexing (WDM) and the rollout of fiber optic cables in the mid-1990s, had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology. This made possible the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, video chat, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking services, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber-optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, and 800 Gbit/s by 2019.[10] The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was rapid in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.[11] The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking services. However, the future of the global network may be shaped by regional differences.[12]

  1. ^ Abbate 1999, p. 3 "The manager of the ARPANET project, Lawrence Roberts, assembled a large team of computer scientists ... and he drew on the ideas of network experimenters in the United States and the United Kingdom. Cerf and Kahn also enlisted the help of computer scientists from England, France and the United States"
  2. ^ "The Computer History Museum, SRI International, and BBN Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of First ARPANET Transmission, Precursor to Today's Internet". SRI International. October 27, 2009. Archived from the original on March 29, 2019. Retrieved September 25, 2017. But the ARPANET itself had now become an island, with no links to the other networks that had sprung up. By the early 1970s, researchers in France, the UK, and the U.S. began developing ways of connecting networks to each other, a process known as internetworking.
  3. ^ by Vinton Cerf, as told to Bernard Aboba (1993). "How the Internet Came to Be". Archived from the original on September 26, 2017. Retrieved September 25, 2017. We began doing concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN, and University College London. So effort at developing the Internet protocols was international from the beginning.
  4. ^ "The Untold Internet". Internet Hall of Fame. October 19, 2015. Retrieved April 3, 2020. many of the milestones that led to the development of the modern Internet are already familiar to many of us: the genesis of the ARPANET, the implementation of the standard network protocol TCP/IP, the growth of LANs (Large Area Networks), the invention of DNS (the Domain Name System), and the adoption of American legislation that funded U.S. Internet expansion—which helped fuel global network access—to name just a few.
  5. ^ "Study into UK IPv4 and IPv6 allocations" (PDF). Reid Technical Facilities Management LLP. 2014. As the network continued to grow, the model of central co-ordination by a contractor funded by the US government became unsustainable. Organisations were using IP-based networking even if they were not directly connected to the ARPAnet. They needed to get globally unique IP addresses. The nature of the ARPAnet was also changing as it was no longer limited to organisations working on ARPA-funded contracts. The US National Science Foundation set up a national IP-based backbone network, NSFnet, so that its grant-holders could be interconnected to supercomputer centres, universities and various national/regional academic/research networks, including ARPAnet. That resulting network of networks was the beginning of today's Internet.
  6. ^ "Origins of the Internet". www.nethistory.info. May 2, 2005. Archived from the original on September 3, 2011.
  7. ^ Clarke, Roger. "Origins and Nature of the Internet in Australia". Archived from the original on February 9, 2021. Retrieved January 21, 2014.
  8. ^ "The First ISP". Indra.com. August 13, 1992. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved October 17, 2015.
  9. ^ Couldry, Nick (2012). Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. London: Polity Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-7456-3920-8.
  10. ^ Nelson, Patrick (March 20, 2019). "Data center fiber to jump to 800 gigabits in 2019". Network World.
  11. ^ Hilbert, Martin; López, Priscila (April 2011). "The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information". Science. 332 (6025): 60–65. Bibcode:2011Sci...332...60H. doi:10.1126/science.1200970. PMID 21310967. S2CID 206531385.
  12. ^ The Editorial Board (October 15, 2018). "There May Soon Be Three Internets. America's Won't Necessarily Be the Best. – A breakup of the web grants privacy, security and freedom to some, and not so much to others". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 2, 2022. Retrieved October 16, 2018.