Crawl Before You Walk, or, a Brief History of the Internet

The Internet, in all its glory and grime, has changed the way people communicate on a day-to-day basis. Though consumers did not feel the effects of the Internet until the mid-nineties, many people worked on its creation as early as the 1960s.

In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. In response, the Department of Defense formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to push the United States to develop advances in science and technology. After the space program broke away and formed NASA, ARPA (also known as DARPA) was left to develop a network that would allow the US to control its missiles and bombers following a nuclear attack.

In his 1960 paper, J.C.R. Licklider first suggested the idea of linking computers together to provide an information storage and retrieval system. Not long after, Paul Baran, Donald Davies, and Leonard Kleinrock developed and implemented the idea of packet switching, where packets of information are queued and routed between nodes over data lines.

By 1969, a network, called the ARPANET, made its first link between two hosts; Stanford Research Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles. By 1981, there were 213 hosts, with a new host added approximately every 20 days. (Source)

In the 1970s, Robert Kahn of DARPA and Vint Cerf of Stanford University worked together to unify the network methods. They developed TCP/IP, a protocol still used today.

Eventually, the US Military portioned off a piece of ARPANET to be used exclusively for military uses, called MILNET. Networks in the ARPANET were still government funded, and use by anyone other than the government and universities was strictly forbidden.

Between 1984 and 1988, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), located northwest of Geneva, began operating with TCP/IP to interconnect their major internal computer systems. It was there in 1990 that a man named Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, a way users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet.

By 1993, Marc Andreessen, NCSA, and the University of Illinois developed a graphical interface to the World Wide Web, called Mosaic. Microsoft would later develop Internet Explorer as a competitor to Mosaic and Netscape.

During the early 90s, independent commercial networks began to grow. All restrictions to noncommercial service disappeared by 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended it’s sponsorship of the Internet. Almost immediately, Internet Service Providers (ISP) AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online.

Microsoft took full advantage of the Internet’s growth when they released Windows 98 with the browser, Internet Explorer, integrated into the desktop.

Today, the Internet plugs ahead, putting information at consumers’ fingertips. Personalized services, such as iGoogle’s webpages, Amazon.com’s purchase suggestions, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook keep the masses addicted to the glowing screens. The future, as they say, is now.