A Brief History of the Internet

The Internet can be traced back to the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) formed in 1969 by the networking of computers at University College Los Angeles (UCLA), University College Santa Barbara, Stanford Research Institute and Utah University.

By 1972 23 nodes(computers) were connected and it had become international with University College, London and the Royal Radar Establishment Norway.

With many of the computers on the network using different protocols (sets of rules) to transfer information it became more and more difficult to manage the ARPANET. In January 1983 the TCP/IP protocol became the only official protocol on the ARPANET.

In 1985 a network of 5 supercomputers were formed by the National Science Foundation, USA called the NSFNET.

It had grown as shown by 1988.

In 1988 the NSFNET and the ARPANET were joined and the growth of the network became exponential.
Regional networks were linked to the network in Canada, Europe and the Pacific.

It was in the mid 1980's that the collection of networks that had been formed became viewed as an internet and eventually the Internet.

In 1992 the millionth host was attached and by 1995 hundreds of regional networks (MAN's, Metropolitan Area Networks) were linked, thousands of LANs (Local Area Networks) and millions of computers.

Much of the growth was due to existing networks being joined to the Internet.

In 1998 there were 16 million hosts attached.

The 'glue' that holds all of this vast network together is the TCP/IP protocol stack.

Most of this course will involve a detailed study of TCP/IP and how it works.

For a computer to be 'on the Internet' then the machine must:

1. be running the TCP/IP protocol stack
2. have an IP address
3. have the ability to send IP packets to other machines on the Internet.

The ability to just receive e-mails is not enough.

PCs using the internet are allocated temporary IP addresses by their Internet Service Provider (ISP) and so they have a temporary Internet presence as long as they are connected via the ISPs router.

The Internet traditionally provides four main applications:

1. e-mail
2. News: Newsgroups are subject groups that can hare information and ideas among like minded people.
3. Remote Login: Telnet, Rlogin allow remote access to a computer
4. File Transfer: FTP copies files from one machine to another.

In 1991 Gopher was released which was a program that allowed the fetching and searching of files on the Internet.

In 1991 Tim Berners Lee working at CERN in Switzerland proposed a method of sharing information on an internet by using documents that contained Hypertext links (Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)). This application became known as the World Wide Web or WWW for short.

Until the advent of the WWW, the Internet was mainly used by academics and researchers but when public access became available in 1992 then use of the Internet rocketed.

In 1993 the Mosaic Web Browser was launched which allowed searches over the WWW.

1994 saw the launch of Netscape Navigator its designers Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark immediately became multi-millionaires. This year also saw the release of the search engine Yahoo.

HTML documents are essentially static documents but the advent of JAVA in 1995 (Sun) saw the inclusion of video, animation and sound into WWW documents.

In 1995 Microsoft 'discovered' the Internet and launched Internet Explorer.