History of the Internet

The Internet began as the ARPANet, a computer networking project funded by the U.S. government’s Advanced Research Project Agency in the late 1960s to crate a computer network that could enable continued communications during war or natural disasters. What was most original about the ARPANet was the approach it took. The network was decentralized, enabling packets of data to find their way from node to node to reach a destination. This meant that data could take more than one path to its final destination, making the network more resistant to problems.

In the early 1980s, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) was created and become the dominant system for swapping packets on the ARPANet. At about this same time, it became clear that TCP/IP would be used to interconnect various other smaller networks of computers, making it possible to share data on a national or even global scale. The term “Internet” was first used to suggest this large sort of network.

In late 1989, the ARPANet project was disbanded, but by that point universities and scientific organizations had taken over the Internet. In the early 1990s, corporations began to use the Internet for e-mail communication, but a ban on commercial traffic by the National Science Foundation kept the Internet from being a medium for commerce. That ban was lifted in 1991, making the Internet more widely available to individuals, corporations, and institutions outside the government and higher learning, as well as for totally commercial uses such as direct sales and advertising.

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee of the CERN, in Switzerland, used a NeXt computer to cobble together the code for what would soon become the World Wide Web. By 1993, Mosaic, a graphic Web browser application, had been released. In 1994, Marc Andresen, one of the original programmers of Mosaic at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputer Applications, moved to California and started the Netscape Corporation with venture capitalist and businessman Jim Clark.

Soon after releasing commercial versions of its Web browser for personal computers, Netscape introduced the Netscape Commerce Server. This was aWeb serverapplication that not only enabled an organization to post Web sites and send Web pages to browsers running on personal computers, where the data that’s transferred in encrypted so that it can’t be read anyone but sender and receiver. Throughout the 1990s, the Internet saw intense growth both as a communication medium and as a mechanism for commerce.

Many upgrades and millions of users later, the Internet and the World Wide Web remains an important part of communication infrastructure for most of the world. The Internet and the Web are increasingly available via non-PC tools such as mobile phones and handheld computers. Television, radio, and print media often refer consumers to the Internet for more information. In time of crisis, the Internet can be the first method by which you reach someone or learn new information.

However, as important as the Internet is to huge governments and global corporations, it’s still accessible to average person, enabling you to create your own Web sites and participate whether your goal is commercial, educational, or more informal. All it takes is a little knowledge and some basic computing tools. Let’s start with the knowledge.