History of Internet
1969 – Birth of a Network
The Internet as we know it today, in the mid-1990s, traces it origins back to a Defense Department project in 1969. The subject of the project was wartime digital communications. At that time the telephone system was about the only theater-scale communications system in use.
1970s – Infancy
DARPA Internet, largely the plaything of academic and military researchers, spent more than a decade in relative obscurity. As Vietnam, Watergate, the Oil Crisis, and the Iranian Hostage Crisis rolled over the nation, several Internet research teams proceeded through a gradual evolution of protocols. In 1975, DARPA declared the project a success and handed its management over to the Defense Communications Agency. Several of today’s key protocols (including IP and TCP) were stable by 1980, and adopted throughout ARPANET by 1983.
Mid 1980s – The Research Net
Let’s outline key features, circa-1983, of what was then called ARPANET. A small computer was a PDP-11/45, and a PDP-11/45 does not fit on your desk. Some sites had a hundred computers attached to the Internet. Most had a dozen or so, probably with something like a VAX doing most of the work – mail, news, EGP routing. Users did their work using DEC VT-100 terminals. FORTRAN was the word of the day. Few companies had Internet access, relying instead on SNA and IBM mainframes. Rather, the Internet community was dominated by universities and military research sites. It’s most popular service was the rapid email it made possible with distant colleagues. In August 1983, there were 562 registered ARPANET hosts (RFC 1296).
Late 1980s – The PC Revolution
Driven largely by the development of the PC and LAN technology, subnetting was standardized in 1985 when RFC 950 was released. LAN technology made the idea of a “catenet” feasible – an internetwork of networks.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) started the Supercomputer Centers program in 1986. Until then, supercomputers such as Crays were largely the playthings of large, well-funded universities and military research centers. NSF’s idea was to make supercomputer resources available to those of more modest means by constructing five supercomputer centers around the country and building a network linking them with potential users. NSF decided to base their network on the Internet protocols, and NSFNET was born. For the next decade, NSFNET would be the core of the U.S. Internet, until its privatization and ultimate retirement in 1995.
The 1987 Internet Worm was the largest security failure in the history of the Internet. More information can be found in RFC 1135. All things considered, it could happen again.
Early 1990s – Address Exhaustion and the Web
In the early 90s, the first address exhaustion crisis hit the Internet technical community. The present solution, CIDR, will sustain the Internet for a few more years by making more efficient use of IP’s existing 32-bit address space. For a more lasting solution, IETF is looking at IPv6 and its 128-bit address space, but CIDR is here to stay.
Crisis aside, the World Wide Web (WWW) has been one of Internet’s most exciting recent developments. The idea of hypertext has been around for more than a decade, but in 1989 a team at the European Center for Particle Research (CERN) in Switzerland developed a set of protocols for transferring hypertext via the Internet. In the early 1990s it was enhanced by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois – one of NSF’s supercomputer centers. The result was NCSA Mosaic, a graphical, point-and-click hypertext browser that made Internet easy. The resulting explosion in “Web sites” drove the Internet into the public eye.
Mid 1990s – The New Internet
Of at least as much interest as Internet’s technical progress in the 1990s has been its sociological progress. It has already become part of the national vocabulary, and seems headed for even greater prominence. It has been accepted by the business community, with a resulting explosion of service providers, consultants, books, and TV coverage. It has given birth to the Free Software Movement.
For the next few years, the Internet will almost certainly be content-driven. Although new protocols are always under development, we have barely begun to explore the potential of just the existing ones. Chief among these is the World Wide Web, with its potential for simple on-line access to almost any information imaginable. Yet even as the Internet intrudes into society, remember that over the last two decades “The Net” has developed a culture of its own, one that may collide with society’s.
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