The beginnings of the internet date back to the 1950s, and, as you might expect, it all started in the United States. During the height of the Cold War, when tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were at an all-time high, American scientists realized they needed a communication system that wouldn’t be wiped out by a potential Soviet nuclear attack.
At that time, both superpowers had deadly nuclear weapons, and people lived in fear of surprise long-range attacks. Computers were massive, expensive machines used only by military scientists and university staff. They were huge, and there weren’t many of them. Researchers had to travel long distances to access the technology.
Back then, if someone wanted to access the data stored on a computer, they either had to go to the location where the computer was or have magnetic tapes physically mailed to them. 📨
In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), gathering the country’s brightest minds to help American military technology outpace its enemies and avoid surprises like the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite by the Soviet Union. 🌍🚀
One of ARPA’s projects was to test the feasibility of creating a long-range computer network.
The First Steps Towards the Internet
In 1962, a computer scientist from MIT, J.C.R. Licklider, came up with the idea of a global computer network. He later shared this concept with his colleagues at the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense (ARPA). 💡
Research by Leonard Kleinrock, Thomas Merrill, and Lawrence G. Roberts on packet-switching theory (Packet Switching involves breaking data into blocks or packets for efficient transmission across various network devices. When one device sends a file to another, it splits the file into packets to determine the most efficient route for sending the data at that moment) paved the way for the world's first large-scale computer network.
In 1965, Lawrence Roberts, responsible for developing ARPA’s computer networks, worked with Leonard Kleinrock to connect two separate computers at different locations for the first time. 💻🔗
By 1969, the first packet-switching network was developed. Kleinrock successfully used it to send messages to another computer, giving birth to the ARPA Network, or ARPANET.
ARPANET was the early version of what we now know as the internet. ARPANET was a success, but membership was initially limited to academic, military, and research institutions contracted by the Department of Defense. The demand for such networks was so high that additional networks were soon created to facilitate information exchange. 📡🌐
The Expansion of ARPANET and the Development of the Internet
By 1973, ARPANET had connected 30 institutions across academic, military, and research fields, including locations as far apart as Hawaii, Norway, and the United Kingdom.
As ARPANET grew, it became necessary to develop a set of rules for communication and handling data packets. In 1974, computer scientists Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf introduced a new method called Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP), a crucial step toward the modern internet.
TCP/IP is a set of protocols that regulate how data is transmitted across a network. Each device connected to the internet gets a unique number called an IP address. TCP and IP work together to ensure internet traffic reaches its destination. 💻➡️📶
Fast forward to January 1, 1983, often regarded as the official birthday of the internet. On this date, ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially switched to the TCP/IP standard, marking the birth of the modern internet.
The Rise of DNS, Websites, and the World Wide Web
By the early 1980s, technological advancements and the rise of desktop computers accelerated the growth of local area networks (LANs). The increase in the number of computers made tracking all available IP addresses difficult. This led to the invention of the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983.
DNS, developed by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel, is the internet’s equivalent of a phone book, converting hard-to-remember IP addresses into simple names (such as google.com). This innovation was one of the key developments that paved the way for the growth of the World Wide Web (WWW).
In 1990, ARPANET was retired. Around the same time, Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN developed the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a computer language used to build most websites and web applications. 🌐📄
Alongside HTML, the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) was created. A URL is essentially the address of a specific resource on the web, whether that be an HTML page, a CSS document, or an image.
The Commercialization of the Internet
The year 1995 was a breakthrough for the internet. Microsoft launched Windows 95, and major players like Amazon, Yahoo, and Internet Explorer emerged, marking the beginning of the commercial internet. 🛒💻
One of the most significant developments in 1995 was the creation of JavaScript by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications Corporation. JavaScript, initially known as Mocha, was developed in just 10 days and became a crucial part of the web’s growth.
The early 2000s saw the dot-com bubble burst, followed by a rapid rise in companies like Google. During this time, Wi-Fi became widespread, making wireless internet and mobile devices more common than ever before. 📶📱
A Brief Summary of the Internet’s Origins
This is a condensed version of the internet’s complex history. Concepts and technologies like DNS, TCP/IP, and URLs are still integral to the modern internet. 🚀
In future posts, I’ll dive deeper into specific topics related to how the internet and websites function. But now you have a foundational understanding of how the internet came to be, and how we got to where we are today.
