At A Glance: The History of the Internet

When talking about the Internet and the World Wide Web, it’s hard to imagine a time when the two did not exist. It is also difficult to think of the two existing independently, but they do have separate definitions.

The Internet is a decentralized connection of computers that allowed users access to any information on the network. The World Wide Web was created as a service that places a graphical interface on the Internet and enables the publication of multimedia documents on the Internet.

During the Cold War, the Internet was created by the U.S. Department of Defense to decentralize their current communication system between researchers and government officials. Both parties need to maintain communication in the event of a nuclear attack. The Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was designed by the government to study the computer networks and solve the government’s communication concerns.
Because of the ARPA’s involvement in the Net’s development, the network originally was known as ARPANET. However, the engineers working at ARPA coined the phrase “the Internet” to explain how the network interconnected other networks. By 1983, the network was officially known as the Internet.

Some of the ARPA innovations that make the Internet possible are transmission control protocol (TCP), Internet protocol (IP) address and the domain name system. Transmission control protocol is the method of breaking up messages in the chunks that are addressed to different computers, so date can be sent and received simultaneously. The IP address is a number system gives each computer a specific name that other computers can identify with. The domain name is a text-based version also used to identify computers on the Internet.
Without the World Wide Web, the Internet existed with text-based only applications such as electronic mail (e-mail), file transfer protocol (FTP), newsgroups, and early chat programs.
Before graphics, email allowed users to send text only messages to one another. Newgroups allowed other users to post an email of their opinions, and chatting allowed multiple users to communicate with text only messages in real time.

The World Wide Web invention of the 1970’s is credited to Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the Web as an easier way to share data across the Internet by using hypertext markup language (HTML) to communicate. The primary features of HTML are the allowable graphics and the ease of linking from computer to computer with the click of a mouse. The hypertext language gives users the power to publish and access information without using confusing computer commands. In 1989, Berners-Lee invented a more practical version of the Web, which has revolutionized the use of the Internet today. In the 1990s, the Internet officially became apart of mainstream life with the development of websites and search engines.