Brief History of
the Internet and the World Wide Web . . The roots of the Internet
go back to the 1960s and the height of the cold war. The
U.S. military, in preparation for a possible nuclear war,
sought a means to ensure communications in the event of an
enemy missile attack. The communications network would need
to be able to withstand large-scale destruction, yet deliver
uninterrupted service. The primary problem with
the existing system was that a direct hit on a central point
of control would disable the entire network. The RAND
Corporation came up with the idea of building a network
without a central point of control. In this way, the system
would not be vulnerable to a direct hit on a single
location. To accommodate this
requirement, a network was devised that allowed data to flow
around downed lines and destroyed components. A special
communication standard, called TCP/IP, (Transmission
Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), was designed to direct
the flow of data between computers on the network and around
possibly damaged sections of the network. Thus, TCP/IP
increased the survivability and reliability of the network,
even in the case of war In 1969, a group of
Department of Defense researchers working for the Advanced
Research Projects Agency linked computers at UCLA, Stanford
Research Institute, the University of Utah, and the
University of California at Santa Barbara to create the
network. The message, "Are you receiving this?" was
successfully sent from Boutler Hall at UCLA across the
network to the other computers. The non-centralized
networked was born and dubbed ARPANET (Advanced Research
Projects Agency Network). At first, the military
researchers used ARPANET to discuss government projects,
sending electronic messages (email) across the network.
However, these researchers soon discovered that email was a
very convenient way to discuss topics far outside even the
most liberal interpretations of research-related actives.
They created email programs that automatically sent the same
message to everyone on a list. Email lists, or list servers,
enabled entire groups of like-minded researchers to share
their interests. Howard Rheingold, in
The Virtual Community, records that "The first large
list, the first to foster its own cultureÖwas
SF-LOVERS, a list of ARPA researchers who wanted to
participate in public discussions about science
fictionÖIt is to the credit of the top ARPA managers
that they allowed virtual communities to happen, despite
pressure to reign in the netheads when they seemed to be
having too much fun. The system engineers redesigned the
system again and again to keep up with explosive growth in
networked communications traffic." The original APRANET
community grew from 4 institutions in 1969 to more than 50
universities and military agencies by 1972. The ability of
APRANET users to interact and share the latest information
was driving ever greater use of the network. Non-military
scientists were pressuring for access to the network too but
ARPANETís acceptable use policy prohibited those
outside the military establishment from using it. So, in
1983, ARPANET split into two networks; one to handle all
scientific traffic and another, MILNET, to carry just
military information. At about the same time, a
group of programmers at the University of California created
an operating system (the master program that runs the
computer) called Berkeley UNIX, with built-in TCP/IP
networking. Berkeley UNIX suddenly made it possible for
computers around the world to exchange information easily.
Large networks, like BITNET, sprang up to serve scholarly
and academic uses outside of just the traditional
sciences. These large networks,
along with many small local networks, were woven and
interconnected using Berkeley UNIX into a network of
networks. Early on in the 1980ís, this collection of
networks was called the APRA Internet, but it eventually
became known as just the Internet. In the 1986, the National
Science Foundation established the NSFNET to link
supercomputers at high speed. NSFNET became the backbone of
the Internet, offering transmission speeds of a
million-bits-per-second rate. The acceptable use policy was
further expanded to include almost everything except
commercial activity. The origins of the World
Wide Web came about in March 1989, when Tim
Berners-Lee of the European Particle Physics Laboratory
(known as CERN, a collective of European high-energy physics
researchers) proposed a project to be used as a means of
sharing research colleagues in the organization. The project
was envisioned to include a system of networked hypertext
documents to be transmitted among members of the high-energy
physics community. By the end of 1990, the first piece of
Web software was developed with the ability to view, edit,
and send hypertext documents to colleagues via the Internet.
The Web was born. In 1991, the U.S. Congress
passed the High Performance Computing Act to establish the
National Research and Education Network (NREN). The goals of
NREN were to experiment and establish high-speed,
high-capacity research, education networks, and to not only
allow commercial activity on the Internet but to find ways
to encourage it. Although the commercial
restrictions on the Net where effectively removed by the
1991 act, it remained primarily a tool for researchers and
academics because of the complexity in using it for
communications. However, in June of 1993 Marc
Andreessen, and other researchers at the National Center
for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), released a graphical
Web Browser - Mosaic 1.0 for X Windows. It was soon followed
by a version that would run on Microsoft Windows -- the
dominant desktop operating system. In 1994, Andreessen left
NCSA to form a new corporation with Jim Clark. The company
created a much easier-to-use and faster Web browser called
Netscape Navigator. The general public went wild over
Navigator, making Netscape Communications the fastest
growing software company in history. Business, sensing the
opportunity, began a mad rush to establish a "presence" on
the Web. Before long, one couldn't
listen to a radio, watch TV, read a magazine, or glance at a
newspaper without being inundated with information about the
growth and potential commercial opportunities of the World
Wide Web. People and companies were signing up by the
millions, with Internet service providers, to gain access to
the Web. They wanted to participate in this new global
communication feast. The Web soon became the dominant
service, with the exception of email, on the
Internet. By late 1996, the Web
began making it into family rooms in the form of Web TVs. In
the form of add-boxes or built-in features, the Web was fast
becoming a part of our everyday lives.
History
of the Internet
[pbs.org]
from the PBS series "Life on the Internet." History
of the Internet and World Wide
Web is a great
collection of links to the history of the Internet and
WWW. Hobbes'
Internet Timeline
traces the events that lead to today's Net. Internet
Background and Basics
is an annotated collection of links to resources on the
background of the Internet.
This has been brief overview of the Internet and the Web.
For additional details on the origin and nature of these
subjects, please peruse the following
links: A
Little History
of the World Wide Web from the people who invented
it.