The modern Internet that we all know of (the World Wide Web) was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and 1990. He had developed this new form of the Internet while working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), the same group that built the Large Hadron Collider. Many tend to believe that this was the start of the Internet but it was only one step in the long chain of technological advances that continues today.
The main precursor to the World Wide Web was the ARPANET—Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It was a huge project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (a part of the U.S. Defense Department) and development started in the late 1960s. The main purpose of this network at the time was to transfer data between computers between Pentagon-funded research sites through telephone lines. This was yet again another technological advancement fueled by growing tensions of the Cold War as it forced the defense industry to innovate.
However, the ARPANET didn’t make things as easy as one would imagine. By early 1970, there were only 4 nodes on the ARPANET that was fully functional and these 4 nodes still had issues. There was no standard form of communication between the nodes so if you wanted to communicate to another node, you would have to know the standard that the node was using. This was manageable with 4 nodes but for obvious reasons, this made scaling an issue.
As the bugs and pitfalls of the ARPANET were being worked out, more and more connections appeared. The first source of new connections was when researchers were moving jobs: if a researcher from University A that was on the ARPANET moved to University B, then a connection to University B was created. This also enabled there to be a somewhat more standard form of communication because the researcher at University B could use the same standard of communication that they used at University A. This method of expansion along with the increased development of the network led to there being 15 nodes by mid-1971 and even nodes in England by 1973. With the expansion of the ARPANET came the development of the TCP/IP protocol (Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) which standardized the way packets (segments of information) were transferred between nodes from the source to their destination.
The ARPANET was not alone in its endeavors. As the ARPANET expanded, the world saw the creation of other networks such as the CSNET (Computer Science Research Network), the CDnet (Canadian Network), BITNET (Because It’s Time Network) and the NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network). The technologies developed by these networks (such as TCP/IP protocol) and the connections that existed would ultimately lead to the backbone of the modern Internet we see today.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/ARPANET
http://theconversation.com/how-the-internet-was-born-from-the-arpanet-to-the-internet-68072
https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/15/how-the-internet-was-invented-1976-arpa-kahn-cerf
https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web
I really liked reading this blog and this is very relevant to the situation in today's society. All of us use the internet to communicate and teach nowadays and we take it for granted. Companies such as Microsoft, founded in 1975, took advantage of the rise of internet and the hardware necessary to run computers and the internet. Microsoft made their own operating system, Windows, in 1985 and since that release, they continued to build upon it and expand the availability of the internet to consumers.
ReplyDeleteSource:
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/microsoft-founded
I really enjoyed that your post went into the more technical components of the ARPANET, such as the specific bugs and node issues the designers faced. I would recommend explaining what a node (used to transport tiny pieces in the system) is, because I was a bit confused and had to search it up at first. You also mentioned the ARPANET was created in order to place the Americans at an advantage during the Cold War, and I wanted to delve a bit deeper into that. Apparently, Paul Baran developed the communication system so it could keep running even if part of it was knocked out by a nuclear blast, which was and is still an amazing feat. Basically, even if one node failed, the others would be able to pick up the slack. So initially, he never expected the research network to eventually morph into the modern internet, and his invention marked a fundamental turning point in the way networks were built!
ReplyDeleteSource:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/h-bomb-and-the-internet
I've always wondered how the internet was first standardized and developed which this post explains very well. Of course, file sharing had existed since the 1980s but innovations exploded across the 1990s and early 21st century. For example, in 2001, P2P or peer to peer protocol was invented as a way to more efficiently transfer files across multiple computers. You guys may have heard of this as "torrenting". Torrenting allows downloading files from multiple other hosts that "seed" the files. Thus, torrenting eliminates the bottleneck from having to download from a single source. It's interesting to see how the internet has developed and how innovation exploded to become what it is today.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent