The Internet has become so tightly embedded in the life of a modern person that sometimes it is even difficult to imagine that it could not exist. It is even more difficult to imagine how we could do without the Internet at all at this time. Indeed, thanks to this invention, any boundaries and distances have practically ceased to exist. Everything on the web is at arm's length. This is truly a worldwide phenomenon. Few people think about it or attach importance to it, but the history of the creation and development of this means of communication is quite interesting. Still, who invented the Internet? What sequence of events led to its appearance that gave impetus to such an incredible rise in popularity?
At the beginning
If you try to look at the very origins, then the history of the Internet goes back to the very first computer networks, which appeared in 1956. Naturally, almost every invention is preceded by a certain need. Even then, it became necessary to unite computing technology in order to provide a simplified data exchange and increase productivity.
In 1957, the US Defense Department decided to start developing reliable information and communication systems in case any danger from the outside arises. In DARPA (the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), it was proposed to use computer networks in this capacity. All this became a great start to the whole information sphere... Of course, the Internet as we know it will appear much later.
The prototype of the Internet - ARPANET
It cannot be said that the creation of the Internet took place overnight; rather, it was created in stages. The design and development of the network was entrusted to four major scientific institutions. These are the California State Universities at Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, the University of Utah and the Stanford Research Center. In 1969, they were linked together into a network called the ARPANET.
The development was funded by the US Department of Defense. Subsequently, other research centers and scientific institutions joined the network. Many expressed a desire to take part in the work on the construction and improvement of technology. The installation of the first server took place on September 2, 1969. A computer named Honeywell DP-516 had an insignificant, by today's standards, amount of RAM - 24 kilobytes.
By the way, there is one more person who can be considered the forefather of the Network. This is Joseph Licklider. He was one of the first active promoters of global networking. If you ask the question of who invented the Internet, then some of the credit definitely belongs to him. His ideas, which are very close in meaning to the Internet that we see now, he published back in 1960 in the article "Human - Computer Symbiosis".
Birthday
We come to the main question. Namely, in what year was the Internet invented? So, on October 29, 1969, a significant event took place. Charlie Cline, who was in Los Angeles, attempted to establish a remote connection to a computer at Stanford, 640 kilometers away. There, the reception of the transmitted symbols was supervised by Bill Duvall, confirming the success by telephone. It was planned to send the LOGIN input command, but on the first attempt, only two characters were sent - LO, after which the Network went out of order. Operations resumed quickly and the transfer was successfully completed at about 22:30. We can say that from this date the Internet takes its actual beginning.
Further development
When the performance was tested empirically new technology, the systematic development of the accompanying software... 1971 is the year of birth of the first email client. He, of course, was far from the software that is available now, but quickly gained popularity.
Already in 1973, the Network began to acquire an international image, as organizations from another continent, namely Europe, were joined. The first countries were Great Britain and Norway. The connection was made via the transatlantic telephone trunk.
In general, in the 1970s, the main services that were available and used on the Internet were email, news, message boards. Even then there were even mailing lists, although there was no spam then, everything was only on business. Spam appeared a little later.
Engineering Network
There was still a lot of work to be done to make using the Internet as simple and intuitive as it is now. In particular, at that time there was no interaction with other computer networks that were built according to different standards. The creators, engineers and programmers faced a difficult and interesting task: they needed to develop a protocol that would standardize and make it possible joint work diverse networks.
John Postel played a huge role in resolving this issue. It was he who came up with the concept of TCP / IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol), which replaced the previously used NCP. It is with the help of TCP / IP that the unification (or merging, overlapping) of networks occurs. The protocol was adopted in 1983 (later, however, it was repeatedly changed and improved). So among the surnames of those who invented the Internet or made a significant contribution to it, his name can definitely be.
At the same time, the ARPANET was increasingly referred to as the "Internet." By the way, this name itself is an abbreviation for INTERconnected NETworks, which means "interconnected networks".
And in 1984 we completed the development and implemented the domain name system. Scientific name - Domain Name Server, DNS. Thanks to this, you are now writing site addresses in letters. Without DNS, you would have to write sets of numbers - IP addresses.
The well-known chats - real-time communication - are based on the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) technology, which was created in 1988.
Another predecessor
In fact, the history of the Internet is very rich in many faces, factors, backgrounds, and coincidences. You can easily write a whole book. But we will focus on the most basic events. In 1984, the US National Science Foundation launched a large inter-university network - NFCnet, which became a serious competitor for ARPANET. It connected several small networks, had a higher bandwidth, and in the first year, about 10,000 computers were connected to it.
The key point was that NFCnet used the principle of "core networks", which provides high stability, speed and reliability. This feature has become a major breakthrough, outlining the contours of the technology we have today.
However, the backbone networks did not become the final stage of development. In 1993, they were replaced by even more advanced NAPs, or, in other words, access points. This opened up the possibility of interaction between commercial networks, which further expanded the boundaries of the use of the Internet.
The technical background is, perhaps, a symbiosis of ARPANET and NFCnet.
World Wide Web, or the well-known WWW
Few people know, but the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN, the one that scared us with the launch of the Large Hadron Collider) played a big role in making the Internet so popular among ordinary users. Or rather, a scientist from Great Britain, Tim Berners-Lee, who worked there. It was he who came up with the concept, which later became the World Wide Web.
Over the course of two years, he developed HTTP, the URI and HTML identifier system. The latter is a hypertext markup programming language. To make it clearer how much this is a huge contribution, it is worth saying that almost all sites are written in HTML (all other options appeared much later). Using HTTP technology, users get access to the vast majority of Internet resources, and URL (URI subtype) are the names that we see in the address bar of a web browser.
So, what we constantly use when browsing sites is the Web. And the Internet is a network through which information and servers are accessed. Nowadays, the Internet is identified directly with the Web, although they are not the same thing.
Some more facts
In 1990, the ARPANET was discontinued due to no longer needed. We can say that the final transition to the Internet has taken place. At the same time, the first connection to the network was carried out using a telephone line.
The World Wide Web became public in 1991. And the very first web browser called NCSA Mosaic was developed by Mark Anderssen in 1993. Perhaps it was Mosaic, together with HTTP, that ensured such a rapid spread of the Internet and its incredible popularity. The first is due to the clear and thoughtful user interface, and the second is due to the fact that it provided all the necessary communications and made it possible to develop content. Now it was truly an information network, the Internet.
Later, providers began to provide data exchange, instead of university and other supercomputers. The World Wide Web Consortium, W3C was organized. And already in 1995, WWW overtook all other protocols in terms of the amount of information transmitted.
Rapid growth
In the 90s, the Internet united almost all disparate networks and grew significantly in all respects. These are technical and software, the number of sites and other information, access speed and stability. But the main growth is the number of users. For 5 years of its existence, the audience already amounted to more than 50 million users. By comparison, it took television 13 years to gather the same numbers. Today, more than two billion people are connected to the network, and this figure is steadily growing.
A wide variety of services have appeared, such as streaming video, cloud storage, social media, forums, blogs and more. Data transfer takes place on high speeds and in gigantic volumes. Hundreds of petabytes of information pass through the web every day. And in general, now it is difficult to imagine the life of a modern person without the World Wide Web. Now access can be obtained via satellite, mobile communications, cable and fiber-optic backbones, from virtually anywhere on Earth. The Internet has become an integral part of our existence.
Conclusion
In the history of the creation and development of global networks, there are too many key persons to be able to unequivocally answer the question of who invented the Internet. This did not happen overnight, but many talented specialists worked on it.
The emergence of the Internet was not a whim or an experiment, it was driven by many factors that made it simply inevitable. We can only pay tribute to all of the above people for the fact that we have at our disposal such an irreplaceable thing as the Internet.
For the first time the idea of creating an information network between computers was expressed in 1960 by Joseph Lyklider, head of the computer department of the Ministry national security USA. In 1962, together with his colleague Welden Clark, he published the first scientific article on online communication.
6 years after the idea was voiced, the first practical developments began. The predecessor of the Internet was the ARPANET project. It was developed on the basis of the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Berkeley. In 1969, the first data packet was sent over the ARPANET.
Only small text messages could be sent over the first communication channel, since the computers were not powerful enough.
The network has evolved gradually. By 1981, more than 200 computers were connected to it, mainly related to scientific institutes and laboratories. Since the seventies, the development of special software for remote computer communication began. One of the first such programs was written by Steve Crocker. ARPANET existed autonomously until 1983, after which this network was connected to the TCP / IP protocol and became part of the future global Internet.
Along with the ARPANET, other LAN projects also emerged. In France, the information and scientific network CYCLADES was developed, launched in 1973. A little later, Fidonet appeared - the first network that became really popular among amateur users.
TCP / IP and WAN Creation
Those who tried to create local area networks, over time faced the issue of incompatibility of data transfer protocols. This problem was solved on the basis of Stanford research institute where the TCP / IP protocol was developed in 1978. By the mid-eighties, this protocol had superseded all others within the ARPANET.
The very name of the Internet appeared in the seventies in connection with the development of the TCP / IP protocol.
In the second half of the eighties, the consolidation of local networks continued. Local networks of NASA and other US government organizations switched to TCP / IP. TO common network European scientific institutions also began to join. At the end of the eighties, it was the turn of the countries of Asia and the states of the socialist bloc - the first network widely spread in the USSR was Fidonet, but the Internet over time began to play an increasingly significant role.
Since the nineties, the Internet has ceased to be exclusively a tool of scientists and government organizations - the number of amateur users began to grow, which continues to this day.
Today the Internet is familiar to most of the world's inhabitants. Each person, one way or another, met with this concept. It is difficult to imagine modern life without the Internet and the conveniences that it provides to humanity. But nevertheless, the network was not always at the same level of development as in our time and, in general, it arose, relatively, not so long ago.
The history of the Internet - M. Eremenko
The official version of the emergence of the Internet
It all began in the period " cold war"Between the USSR and the USA. In early October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite into space. The USA lagged behind the USSR in scientific activity, and after that the gap between the states became even more noticeable. Then the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, signed an order to establish the Agency for Advanced Scientific Projects and Research, which received the name ARPA. The agency worked within the country's defense ministry. It had to create a network of major centers.
The scientist Leonard Kleinork put forward the theory of packet communication, which turned out to be an important step forward in the development of computer networks. The next important step was to be a real connection between computers. This interaction was organized between two computers, one of which was in Massachusetts and the other in California. Communication between them was carried out thanks to a dial-up telephone line. So, the very first non-local network was created.
History of the Internet
Shortly after the experiment
ARPANET was founded in 1967. Four computers with a single data transfer protocol were connected to the network. A little later, e-mail began to develop. From the very beginning, the purpose of the created network was to use it for defense purposes. Documents were sent via e-mail. But the network was constantly and rapidly evolving. All new nodes were connected to it. The network included large scientific institutions. In the late seventies, there were about a hundred hosting sites here.
At the same time, other networks were developing separately. Each of them worked in its own way. In order to be able to connect them, it was necessary that they all work under a single network protocol.
In 1973, intensive work began to create such a protocol. The Internetting Project was created - a project, the result of which was to unite different networks into one. Robert Kann was appointed as the main project managers. The protocol was based on the following basic principles:
- When connected to the Internet, the computer network should not be internally rebuilt;
- The package of information must be delivered to the designated place;
- Gateways and routers must be inherent to interconnect networks;
- The global network should not be controlled by anyone in particular or by a common system.
January 1, 1983 is a landmark date in the history of the Internet. It was on this day that all computers that were previously part of the ARPANET switched to the Internet protocol developed by the team of Robert Kann. Thus, a standard was established by which the Internet could develop further. And today it develops according to this standard.
The first Russian network that was connected to the Internet
The RELCOM network has become. It was created by physicists for communication and joint research with their Western colleagues in 1990. Initially, the Internet in Russia developed at universities and scientific institutions. In 1995, a state scientific network called RUNNet began its work. Gradually, ordinary citizens of large cities became its users. Many went to the Internet out of interest.
In a short time, more and more new users came to the network. But using the Internet at that time was not very convenient, because of its inability to accommodate ordinary visitors. In connection with such popularity, a year later the first search robot appeared - rambler. A year later, Yandex began to exist. This very year ICQ appeared. And in two years the first money transfer was carried out via the Internet. From that time, e-commerce began to develop.
The first computer networks focused on the transmission of information, documents, or rather text. At this time, the Internet was the lot of the elite, since it was mainly business documentation or scientific texts... But with the rapid development of the Internet in the early nineties, there was a problem with displaying graphics. A group of American scientists from the state of Illinois developed the first browser - mosaic. This attracted more and more private users to use the World Wide Web.
Internet access became easier every year
And there were more and more users. In 2000, there were about twenty million sites on the Internet. In 2003, their number increased fivefold - more than one hundred thousand. The number of network users is increasing exponentially to this day.
The Internet takes a huge place in the development of society and people's lives. People develop the Internet, and it, in turn, develops human knowledge. From the Internet, you can take out a lot of useful and necessary this moment information. Many people in our time on the Internet earn, have fun, meet and communicate. With the help of Internet programs like Skype, close people who are separated by hundreds of kilometers can see each other (even on a monitor) and communicate.
The Internet provides tremendous opportunities for people who are sick and cannot leave home on their own. After all, here you can get an education, find a job and even buy the necessary things. Provided that the person is in the network coverage area. Thus, the XXI century is a new informative age, which provides many opportunities thanks to the Internet.
Internet, global network, The World Wide Web- all these are the names of a huge information space that covers the whole world. The history of the emergence and development of this information web is bright and unusual. A decade after its inception, the global network conquered a large number of organizations in different countries, which began to actively use it for their work.
The popularity of the global network grew rapidly. Today, the Internet has become a daily occurrence for us, and we are no longer surprised by it.
But what was history of the internet? How did it come about? How did it all start, and how did this fabulous network, containing information about everything, develop? You can read about this further in the article.
First packet-switched network ARPANET
The history of the Internet dates back to the late 50s of the 20th century, when the nuclear missile arms race between the USSR and the USA began. At this time, the USSR acquired intercontinental missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to US territory. This fact served as the impetus for the decision by the American military to create a reliable communication and information transmission system in case of war. The ARPA agency, which was responsible for introducing new technologies into the American army, proposed using a computer network for this, which would not fail if any of its nodes or several nodes were destroyed. The development of the network was entrusted to four organizations:
- Stanford Research Center
- University of California Los Angeles
- University of Utah
- California State University
The development was funded by the US Department of Defense. The creators based the network on the technology described American engineer Leonard Kleinrock in 1961, according to which you can split data streams into packets (some sequences) and chain them through a network where there are alternative routes between two nodes.
The first test of such a network was carried out on October 29, 1969. A connection was made between two computers, which were installed at a distance of 640 km from each other. One computer was located at the University of California and the other at Stanford University. The lines were leased from the telephone company AT&T, which provided a connection speed of 56 Kbps. The test was that the first operator (Charlie Kline
from the University of Los Angeles) entered the word LOGIN, and the second (Bill Duvall from the Stanford Institute) had to confirm by phone that he sees it on his screen. At 21:00 the first attempt was made, but only three LOG symbols were sent. At 22:30 the connection was repeated and everything worked out. This date - October 29, 1969, is now considered the birthday of the Internet. The network was named ARPANET.
At the end of 1969, the computers of the four above-mentioned scientific institutions were united into a single network.
Thus, as a result of the development of a packet-switched network, a fast and high-quality digital communication network was created, which relied on an excellently developed network telephone lines USA. The ARPANET has become not only an excellent "conductor" of military codograms and files, but also served as a kind of "springboard" for other networks.
In 1971, Ray Tomlison develops a system Email and writes a program with which it became possible to exchange mail messages over the network. He also suggested using the @ sign, which to this day is an integral part of any E-mail address. It is interesting that in the world it is called quite differently: we have a "dog", in Germany - a "hanging monkey", in Denmark - an "appendage of an elephant", and in Greece - a "little duck".
In 1972, the first international connections to the ARPANET were made. Machines from England and Norway were connected to the network. At the same time, a satellite communication line with the University of Hawaii was launched. In 1977, the number of hosts reached one hundred. The network was connected to Western Europe via satellite channels.
ARPANET logic card, March 1977 (click to enlarge) Internet Protocol TCP / IP
The next significant event in the history of the Internet took place in 1983, when the ARPANET changed its communications protocol from NCP to TCP / IP.
TCP / IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) is one of the data reception / transmission protocols currently used in computer networks. The name of the protocol consists of two parts:
- TCP - the protocol converts messages into a stream of packets on the transmitting side and collects the packets back into messages on the receiving side.
- IP - the protocol manages the addressing of packets, routing them along different routes between network nodes, and allows you to interconnect different networks.
With the advent of the Internet Protocol (IP), the word internet began to be used to refer to interconnected networks and internetworking.
In the mid-80s, the NSFNET network was created, uniting a large number of computers installed in various US universities. In parallel, other networks are being created (BITNET, CSNET, etc.). In the mid-90s, the ARPANET was dismantled, and its servers were connected to new networks.
In Russia, the Institute of Atomic Energy named after V.I. I.V. Kurchatov (IAE). In 1990, a network of UNIX users, RELCOM, was created in Russia. She established a connection between IAE and DEMOS. In August of that year, she connects to the European UNIX user network EUnet. The DEMOS company was founded in February 1989 to develop software and build local computer networks. DEMOS became the first commercial company in the USSR, which managed to establish information exchange with the system of Western computer networks.
The emergence of WWW (World Wide Web)
Tim Berners-Lee
An important stage in the history of the Internet is undoubtedly the appearance in 1991 of a new service - the World Wide Web (WWW or Web, in translation the World Wide Web). This service was based on the use of hypertext.
Hypertext is a text (Web page) that contains a link to another piece of text in the same document and even to another document. When such a link is activated, the browser program opens the fragment or the document that corresponds to it.
The inventor of the World Wide Web is the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee (together with Robert Kayo). Tim Berners-Lee created the first in internet history web server and first browser. He figured out how to use hypertext links to navigate the web. The first ever website (http://info.cern.ch/) was also created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990.
The first web server in the history of the Internet, developed by Tim Berners-Lee
With the advent of the WWW service and browser programs that display Web pages on a user's computer, a boom in the Internet began. The first browser with a graphical interface, which appeared in 1993, was "NCSA Mosaic".
The clarity and ease of use of the WWW led to the fact that the mass user began to connect to the Internet. From now on, anyone who could click on the screen with a mouse could “walk” on the Internet. The number of Internet users began to grow like an avalanche.
WWW is just one of the services on the Internet. The Internet also provides the operation of other services: e-mail (E-mail), file transfer (FTP) and some others. In the next article, you will find out.
The Internet (from the English Internet) is a worldwide system of voluntarily interconnected computer networks, built on the use of the IP protocol and routing of data packets. The Internet forms a global information space, serves as the physical basis for the World Wide Web and many systems (protocols) for data transmission. Often referred to as the World Wide Web and the Global Web.
History of appearance.
After launch The Soviet Union artificial Earth satellite in 1957, the US Department of Defense felt that in case of war, America needed a reliable information transmission system. Agency of advanced research projects USA (ARPA) proposed to develop a computer network for this, which was called ARPANET (eng. AdvancedResearchProjectsAgencyNetwork), and in 1969, within the framework of the project, the network has already united four scientific institutions. Then the ARPANET network began to actively grow and develop, scientists from various fields of science began to use it.
First ARPANET server was installed on September 1, 1969 at the University of California, Los Angeles.
By 1971, the first program for sending e-mail over the network was developed, the program immediately became very popular.
In 1973, the first foreign organizations from Great Britain and Norway were connected to the network via a transatlantic telephone cable, the network became international.
In the 1970s, the network was mainly used for sending e-mail, then the first lists appeared. mailing list, newsgroups and message boards. However, at that time, the network could not yet easily interoperate with other networks built on other technical standards.
By the end of the 1970s, data transfer protocols began to develop rapidly, which were standardized in 1982-83.
On January 1, 1983, the ARPANET switched from the NCP protocol to TCP / IP, which is still successfully used to combine (or, as they say, "layering") networks. It was in 1983 that the term "Internet" was assigned to the ARPANET.
In 1984, the Domain Name System (DNS) was developed.
In 1984, the ARPANET had a serious rival, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) founded the vast intercollegiate network NSFNet (short for the English National Science Foundation Network), which was made up of smaller networks (including the then famous Usenet and Bitnet networks) and had much more throughput than ARPANET. About 10 thousand computers were connected to this network in a year, and the title “Internet” began to smoothly transition to NSFNet.
In 1988, the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol was invented, making real-time communication possible on the Internet.
In 1989, in Europe, within the walls of the European Council for Nuclear Research (French Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, CERN), the concept of the World Wide Web was born. It was proposed by the famous British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who over the course of two years developed the HTTP protocol, HTML language and URIs.
In 1990, the ARPANET ceased to exist, completely losing the competition to NSFNet. In the same year, the first telephone connection to the Internet was recorded.
In 1991, the World Wide Web became publicly available on the Internet, and in 1993 the famous NCSA Mosaic web browser appeared. The World Wide Web was gaining popularity.
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