Entry 1: history of the Internet

History of the INTERNET

Regardless of whether you grew up with computers or were introduced to them in adulthood, it is difficult now to imagine a world in which the internet does not exist. We rely on the internet to manage our money, search for jobs, represent ourselves professionally, and keep in contact with loved ones across the country or even across the world.

We use the internet to research, to learn, and to enable ourselves to complete projects we would not know how to do without looking up instructions. Businesses use the internet to collaborate across offices and even across the hall. Financial transactions are handled in seconds. Communication is instantaneous. Even our local and federal governments rely on the internet to manage their daily operations.

The internet itself is barely fifty years old, and the world wide web less than thirty, but if either were to disappear, modern business would all but cease. How did such an influential system come into development so quickly? It all began with a simple idea from J. C. R. Licklider.

ARPANET

Licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist, put out the idea in 1960 of a network of computers connected together by "wide-band communication lines" through which they could share data and information storage. Licklider was hired as the head of computer research by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and his small idea took off.

By 1966, MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts had developed a plan for "ARPANET", a computer network designed to withstand power outages, even if a few of the computers were inactive. The first ARPANET link was made on October 29, 1969, between the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute. Only two letters were sent before the system crashed, but that was all the encouragement the computer researchers needed.

More universities and hosts were added to ARPANET as the system stabilized, and by 1981, there were over 200 hosts on the system. A number of other computer networks sprung up in the wake of ARPANET, including the Merit Network, CYCLADES, and the first international packet network, IPSS. However, with so many differing systems, something had to be developed to integrate them all into one. Robert Kahn of DARPA and Vinton Cerf of Stanford University worked together on a solution, and in 1977, the internet protocol suite was used to seamlessly link three different networks. Using this new protocol for data transmission, the National Science Foundation created NSFNET in 1986, capable of handling 1.5 megabits per second, which replaced the now-outdated ARPANET.

The World Wide Web

The world wide web, or WWW, was created as a method to navigate the now extensive system of connected computers. Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), developed a rudimentary hypertext program called ENQUIRE.

The program was designed to make information readily available to users, and to allow a user to explore relationships between different pages (i.e. clicking to get to a different section of a website). By 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee developed the skeletal outline of the internet, including a web browser and web server.

Unfortunately, the world wasn't ready for his ideas. The web was still a series of simple text pages, difficult to navigate, and inaccessible to most people. But all that changed in 1993, with the release of the Mosaic web browser, which allowed users to explore multimedia online. 1993 also saw the introduction of the first modern search engines. Though early search engines were primitive, mostly manual, and primarily indexed only titles and headers, in 1994 WebCrawler began to "crawl" the net, indexing entire pages of active websites. This technology opened the door for more powerful search engines, and made it possible to easily search through vast amounts of connected information.

In this same year, Berners-Lee founded the world wide web Consortium (W3C) to help further develop ease of use and accessibility of the web, and made it a standard that the web should be available to the public for free and with no patent.

Web 2.0

The aptly named dot-com boom of 1999 saw many people move their businesses online, such as newspapers, retailers, and entertainment offices. In those early days, websites traditionally created and published their own information, which was simply viewed by site visitors, with little to no interaction between creators and users. As the web continued to grow, users began to demand more interaction from the sites they visited, and the result — typically referred to as Web 2.0 — was a more social internet.

Web 2.0 is characterized by interactive websites, social knowledge sharing, user-generated content, online collaboration, embedded applications and multimedia, mobile connections, and — of course — social media. It is a web in which site owners and their audience interacts continuously, average users can become content providers, and visitors are able to create a unique, personal internet experience.