History of the Internet

The internet did not begin with the idea that people like us would be using it to send messages back and forth to each other or to surf for information

The US Department of Defense started the Internet in the 1960s during the Cold War. After the Russians put the Sputnik satellite into space in 1957, the US Government formed an agency called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to develop technology for the military and improved its communication among all its employees who worked in many different places.

They wanted to have this communications network work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. And if the most direct route was not available, “routers” would redirect the information around the problem. They called their network ARPANET

Other parts of the government thought the Internet was a good idea, so they started using it too. The internet began to grow. And soon professors and other people who worked at universities started using the Internet to communicate and share their research and ideas. The first e-mail program was invented in 1972 with the now famous@ symbol by Ray Tomlinson, and the first computer to computer “chat” happened between UCLA and Standford Research Institute (SRI) in California. Universities started internet components like Newsgroups, Usergroups, and listservs based on their interests and research

Later in the 1970s a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) was developed that allowed different types of local networks to communicate with each other based on a number system. By 1983 at the University of Wisconsin, the Domain Name System was started that used words instead of numbers, easier to remember and recognize.

In the early 1990s a physicist named Tim Berners-Lee who worked at a place called CERN in Europe developed a way for whole text or research papers to be linked and shared, which was called hypertext, and because of hypertext, the World Wide Web was born.

University libraries wanted to create software to index and search these research materials. At first it was just a text based system with names like Archie for archives and Gopher, the University of Minnesota mascot, VERONICA (Very Easy Rodent Oriented Netwide Index to Computer Archives) and JUGHEAD (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display), But then in 1993 a graphic interfaced called MOSAIC was devised – the first web “browser”. After that, Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer were developed to search the web.

Finally, by the late-1990s businesses took over running the internet with Internet Service Providers (ISP) such as AOL. They simplified access to the Internet, making it possible for the rest of the public to gain access. So now the internet is used by people of all ages throughout the world, and there are over a billion web pages on the internet. Who knows what will happen next.