A brief history of the Internet

The history of the Internet spans back to more than 40 years ago. In August 1962, a series of memos about a “Galactic Network" concept served as the earliest known ideas of what is now the Internet. The thoughts that information could be shared between a network of several computers was the brainchild of Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider. A year later, Licklider was employed as a computer scientist for the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency to help government officials communicate during the Cold War.

We learned about the ARPA project in class, and that this was essentially how the Internet was born. It also gave birth to Internet Protocol and Transmission Control Protocol addresses. Today, the Internet and the World Wide Web have completely revolutionized the way people communicate.

One of the below Web logs mentions “Usenet.” The concept of the Usenet reminds me of how we share information via the Web today. The Usenet, which was first developed in 1979, allows participants to read and post messages in categories called “newsgroups.” To me, this sounds a lot like chat rooms, message boards, social networking sites and many of the forms of communication that are popular on the Web today.

One different aspect about Usenet is that it is decentralized. Everyone is an administrator, which is unique when you consider that today we are exploring whether a government entity or the free market should have control of the Internet. Another interesting fact about the Usenet is that it was the place where Tim Berners-Lee announced the introduction of the World Wide Web.

In his message, Berners-Lee said he wanted more information to be available to people. “The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to
make an easy but powerful global information system,” he wrote in his message.

Today, the World Wide Web is practically a necessity. We learned in class that this is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed over the Internet. We share information over the Web using hypertext markup language, or HTML, which is still a popular form of markup languages for Web pages.

Recent news concerning the state of the Internet is interesting. About a year ago, I heard a podcast by longtime PBS journalist Bill Moyers titled “The Net at Risk.”

It explored net neutrality and big companies’ and big governments’ influence on the Internet. One concern of net neutrality is that Internet providers could charge a fee to companies ensuring that the companies’ content would load faster. Content speed is not currently controlled by major corporations.

On the PBS Web site, Moyers asks a provocative question in today’s media issue: Who owns the Internet? Our other forms of communication, such as newspapers, magazines, television and even phone services, are owned by a few, ultra-powerful corporations that essentially supply us with access to the information we need and want. The Internet is supposed to be what Moyers and others call a global democracy, but its future as a global democracy sometimes looks rather grim.