What Is The Internet?

A brief history of the Internet

On March 9, 1999, during an interview on CNN, then-Vice-President Al Gore was asked what accomplishments separated him from other presidential hopefuls. His answer:- "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet!"

In October of 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, and to say that the United States panicked is putting it mildly. You see, up until that time, we just ASSUMED that the United States was THE world leader in science and technology. In fact, the USSR was sort of looked upon as a powerful, but technologically backward country. Now, for those of you who did not live through the so-called "Cold-War" years, it's difficult to imagine what the launching of Sputnik did to the mentality of the United States. Suddenly, we were a "second-rate" country, and government leaders, as well as the man and woman on the street, could only envision nuclear bombs raining down on us from unreachable, untouchable Russian satellites! It's hard to believe, but a growth industry of the time was companies that built bomb shelters in your back yard!

Something had to be done and done FAST!

Sothe following year, the United States Department of Defence formed "ARPA" (the Advanced Research Projects Agency) specifically to re-establish the U.S. lead in science and technology, especially in military matters.

In 1962 the RAND corporation, a government "think tank," was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain command and control over it's missiles and bombers after an all-out nuclear war, when normal means of communication would be wiped out. Sound a little paranoid? Remember folks, this was during the Cold War. Both countries maintained huge fleets of nuclear weapon laden bombers in the air 24 hours a day, in addition to THOUSANDS of nuclear ICBM´s in bunkers and submarines. It was in 1962 that the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred, during which we were actually expecting nuclear missiles to be launched at us at any moment form the shores of Cuba.

The RAND Corporation study was finally made public in 1964, and envisioned a decentralized "network" of powerful computers that would link military command posts and relay messages back and forth. Since it would be designed from the first to have no "central" source, an enemy could not target one specific area and knock out the whole system.

The first "node" (computer capable of relaying information) was set up at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in September of 1969, and by December of that year, three additional "nodes" were set up at SRI, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. This infant computer network of four interconnected computers was named the "ARPANET," after it‚s Pentagon sponsor.

By 1972 there were still only 23 computers on this "baby Internet," but something very important happened - Ray Tomlinson of BBN created the very first email program.

Now, understand, the federally subsidized ARPANET was designed to be a scientific and military communication system ONLY - a means of transferring scientific data between top-level scientists working at Universities, as well as communiqués between military command posts during time of all-out nuclear war. But something VERY strange was happening! The main traffic on ARPANET was NOT long-distance computing and military communications - it was news and personal messages! The researchers working on this project had turned ARPANET into their very own, ultra high-speed "post office!" Mailing lists were soon born, and the biggest was "SF-LOVERS" - it was a list for science fiction fans.

By 1973, 75% of all ARPANET traffic was email

Although the term "Internet" was first used in a scientific paper by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn as early as 1974, it was not until 1982 when the Internet as we know it was really born. That was the year that Vint and Bob perfected the computer language known as "TCP/IP." By January of the following year every machine connected to ARPANET was required to use TCP/IP and, for the first time, the loose connection of networks that made up the ARPANET could be coherently and reliably connected into a TRUE "Inter"-net.

In 1984 the science fiction author William Gibson first coined the term "cyberspace" in his novel "Neuromancer." That same year the number of Internet hosting computers exceeded 1,000 for the first time, and by 1987 the number jumped to over 28,000! It was about this same period (the mid-80’s) that the proliferation of relatively inexpensive personal computers gave REAL impetus to the growth of the Internet. No longer was this exciting, new communications medium the province of universities, the military, and a few large companies - the average Joe-on-the-street (that‚s you and me!) was now able to "log on."

ARPANET was officially decommissioned in 1990, and guess what!? Nobody noticed! By that time the Internet had taken over virtually all of the duties of "old-man ARPANET."

Understand, though, that up until this time, there was STILL no such thing as the World Wide Web. You see, although the terms Internet and Web are almost always used to mean the same thing, they are actually completely distinct. The Internet is the global community of computers that makes the exchange of information possible. The World Wide Web, on the other hand, is a PART of the Internet. In other words, the Net exists independently of the Web, but the Web can't exist without the Net.

In 1991, a physicist by the name of Dr. Timothy Berners-Lee at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland developed a new and unique technique for distributing information on the Internet. This technique allowed users to connect from one document to another (or one website to another) by the use of "hyperlinks." Just think what the Internet would be like today if we weren't‚t able to "click-and-go!" The icing on the cupcake was that this program also allowed, for the first time, the transfer of not just words, but pictures and sounds! Pretty exciting stuff!

But as exciting as Dr. Berners-Lee new program was, even two years later the World Wide Web still only accounted for a mere 1% of all Internet traffic. You see, there was still a piece of the puzzle missing - there was as yet no easy-to-use way to navigate your way around the now exploding Internet. In other words, what was needed was a "browser."

In 1993 Marc Andreesen and a group of student programmers at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications developed the first user-friendly browser for the World Wide Web that they called "Mosaic." (One year later, by the way, Marc left the NCSA to form his own company which he called Netscape Communications. Ever hear of it!?) This was also the year that the National Science Foundation set up InterNIC, which, through Network Solutions, until recently was solely responsible for assigning us our “dotcom”domain names.

The Web is based on a set of rules for exchanging information. This collection of rules is known as “Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol,” or more familiarly, “HTTP.” We can go back and forth between pages on the Net because Web browsers (like Marc Andreesen's "Netscape," or Microsoft's "Internet Explorer") which actually READ the pages, and Web servers (computers that STORE the pages) both understand HTTP.

This new browser was the real "icing on the cupcake" for the World Wide Web, which began to grow at the astounding rate of 381 THOUSAND percent a YEAR! Within just two more years WWW traffic was the dominant traffic on the Internet, and you could order a pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut over the Internet. The era of e-commerce had arrived!

By 1996 45 million people worldwide were on the Internet, with about 30 million of those (about 67%) in the United States and Canada. By 1999 the number of world-wide "net-izens" had increased to 150 million; it took only one more year for that number to double to over 300 million. And for the first time the number of American homes with Internet access surpassed 50%.

Since 1989, the Internet has grown from a Cold War idea for communicating among the remains of a society devastated by all-out nuclear war, to the Information Superhighway that we work and play on today.