The Internet: A History

The history of the World Wide Web and Internet dates back several years before “www” was even used to describe this new medium. Vannevar Bush, a American scientist, foreshadowed the use of such a network in a 1945 article, when speaking of “trailblazers” that would work together to form a “mass of the common record.” Bush’s ideas for this “memex,” a forerunner to the CPU, existed even before that.

The groundwork for today’s Internet was laid as early as 1958, when the U.S. Department of Defense formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA would exist to work on missions designated by the Secretary of Defense, and was a reaction to the Soviet Union launching the world’s first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.

ARPA eventually began working on the first packet-switching network (as opposed to a telephone’s “circuit-switching") to send information from one site to another. The United States feared that should the Soviets deliver a nuclear strike, our country’s telephone system would fail, thus bringing on the need for a more stable network.

Scientists, professors and top graduate students in the country (members of ARPA) devised a system that would send information in “packets” - smaller bits of the original message. The packets contained headers identifying where the information was destined. To do this the government hired Paul Baran, who invented the “hot potato” routing method for these messages. Baran said he was inspired by mice running mazes, and theorized that chopped, equal-sized packets would be able to find their way to the destination, even if part of the network was destroyed.

Packet switching proved possible, and the ARPANET became a reality. The agency then attempted to set up a network across four different universities, using Interface Message Processors, or simply IMPs. These IMPs were smaller versions of the universities’ home computers, that could talk to one another through one central modem and killed the need for a separate network for each. In 1969 the first IMP arrived at UCLA and all four computers were connected before the year was up. By April 1971 the network included 18 computers.

The Internet was initially used solely for transferring textual information. Even e-mail was a side-project of ARPA’s Ray Tomlinson, who invented the application in 1969, just thinking it would be something cool to do between computers. E-mail exploded, and was known as the “killer app” for the fledgling network. But the giant leap forward this technology provided was not duplicated for 20 years, when in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, a user-friendly means of accessing the information offered by the Internet. Through the application of Hypertext Markup Language and a web browser, viewers could see and read data translated onto their computers.

The Internet has since grown into its current state after moving past one-way communication to two-way, where user and audience member meld to form a streaming, continuing flow of new information. This struggle to learn the nuances of multimedia, blogs and social networking sites is at the forefront of the greatest hurdles, and greatest possibilities, of the Internet.