A brief history of the Internet

What is the internet?

In the most simple terms, the internet is a global network of computers. It is a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for their geographic location.

For a more formal definition we have to refer to the resolution passed by the Federal Networking Council (FNC) on 24 October 1995. This resolution was developed in consultation with members of the internet and intellectual property rights communities and defines the term internet.

RESOLUTION: The Federal Networking Council (FNC) agrees that the following language reflects our definition of the term "Internet". "Internet" refers to the global information system that -

1. is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow ons;
2. is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and
3. provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.

Early Development

The internet has its origins in the early 1960s at the instigation of the US Department of Defense. They required a system where strategic computer networks would remain in operation even though some parts of the network were rendered inoperable due to nuclear war.

Four factors led to the development of the internet as we know it today:

1. The development of "Packet Switching" and the ARPANET
2. The operations and management aspects of a global, complex infrastructure
3. The social aspect which resulted in a large number of people working together to create and develop the technology and, finally
4. The commercialization aspect, which has resulted in an effective transition of research results into an information infrastructure that is broadly deployed and available

Packet switching is a method of dividing a message or block of data into parts called packets, sending them to their destination by one or more routes and then reassembling them. This has several advantages, principally that, because no transmission medium is 100% reliable, it allows one or more "bad" packets to be resent while other "good" packets are uninterrupted in their transmission.

ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork), the forerunner of the internet was established in 1969. The four host computers connected to ARPANET at the end of 1969 were located at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. In the months that followed, scientists worked on refining the software that would expand the network's capabilities. At the same time, ever more computers were linked to the net. By December 1971 ARPANET linked 23 host computers to each other.

ARPANET to Internet

At the First International Conference on Computer Communications held in Washington DC during October 1972 a public demonstration of ARPANET was given linking computers together from 40 different locations. Representatives from around the world discussed the need to begin establishing agreed upon protocols. This conference also set up The InterNetwork Working Group (INWG) which was established to begin discussions on such a protocol.

By 1974 the common language that would allow different networks to communicate with each other had been developed. This was known as transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP). One of the crucial concepts of the protocol was that it should have open architecture. The other implications inherent in the design concept were:

• Each distinct network should be able to work on its own and no internal changes would be required to such a network to connect it to the internet.
• Communication would be on a best effort basis. If a packet of information didn't make it to its final destination, it would be retransmitted from its source.
• Black boxes (later to be called gateways and routers) would be used to connect the networks. No information about the individual flows of packets passing through them would be retained by the gateways, thereby cutting down their workload and speeding up traffic but also removing a possible means of censorship and control.
• There would be no global control at the operations level.

Although 1974 marked the beginning of TCP/IP, it took several years of modification and redesign before it was completed and universally adopted. Until 1982 the computer networking world was still fairly chaotic with numerous competing techniques and protocols, however, ARPANET was still the backbone of the entire system. In 1982 ARPANET finally adopted the TCP/IP protocol and the Internet was born, a connected set of networks using the TCP/IP protocol.

While the technology of the Internet is undoubtedly powerful in its own right, it only becomes useful to the general public when providing services such as Electronic Mail (E-mail), file transfer via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and access to WWW, the World Wide Web.

From Internet to World Wide Web

Up until this stage the development of the internet was almost entirely 'science led'. At the same time rapid advances in computer capacities and speeds were also taking place enabling the system to expand further.

In the mid-eighties some governments to the decision to encourage the use of the internet throughout the higher education system. JANET (Joint Academic Network) was announced in 1984 by the British government to serve British universities and the US National Science Foundation announced the establishment of NSFNet to serve American universities the following year.

The American program included a number of factors that were to prove vital for the future development of the internet.

• All participants in the program had to use TCP/IP protocols.
• Federal Agencies would share the cost of establishing common infrastructure and support the gateways.
• NSFNet signed shared infrastructure 'no-metered-cost' agreements with other scientific networks (including ARPANET), which has formed the model for all subsequent agreements.
• It supported the Internet Activities Board (the successor to the Internetworking Working Group) and encouraged international cooperation in further research.
• NSFNet agreed to provide the 'backbone' for the US internet service by providing 5 supercomputers to service the envisioned traffic. The one proviso of this was that purposes "not in support of research and education" were excluded.

Two of the major effects of the creation of NSFNet were to break the capacity bottleneck and to encourage a surge in internet use. From its early origins it took until the latter part of 1985 for the number of computer hosts attached to the internet to top 2000. By the end of 1987, just 2 years later, the figure had risen to over 28 000. The third effect, arising out of the exclusion of commercial developers from the NSFNet backbone, was the stimulation of development of private and commercial internet providers.

Although commercial users were excluded from the NSFNet backbone, their interests were not neglected. Hardware and software developers had been including TCP/IP to their product packages but, because they had little experience in how the products were supposed to work, they often had difficulties in adapting it to their own and their customer's needs. One of the major factors behind the internet's early development was the open availability of information. In 1985 the Internet Activities Board organized the first workshop,specifically targeting the private sector, to discuss the potential of TCP/IP protocols. In 1987 the first subscription based commercial internet company was founded.

At this stage of its development the internet was still a strange environment for the novice user with most of the available documentation highly scientific and transfer times slow. The major expansion of the internet was still driven by the scientific and academic communities.

The World Wide Web (WWW)

The World Wide Web is a network of sites that can be searched and retrieved by a special protocol known as HyperText Transfer Protocol. In basic terms this protocol simplified the writing of addresses and automatically searched the internet for the address and automatically called up the document for viewing.

The concept of the World Wide Web was designed by Tim Berners-Lee and scientists at CERN in Geneva during 1989. Their aim was to make it easier to retrieve research documentation. In 1991 the specifications of Universal Document Identifiers (UDIs now renamed URIs), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) were published.

In 1993 Mosaic X, a web browser was launched. This program introduced many of the features that are still features of today's web browsers, including ease of use and improved graphic capabilities. The potential of HTML to create graphically attractive websites and the ease with which these sites could be viewed led to the proliferation of commercial websites. These developments were accelerated by the availability of more powerful and cheaper personal computers.

The web exploded, from 3.2 million hosts and 3 000 websites in 1994 to 19.5 million hosts and 1.2 million websites in 1997 to 110 million hosts and 30 million websites by January of 2001.