The history of the Internet in brief

Here is the brief history of the Internet:



ARPA (1957)

There is a competition between USSR and USA for technology and USSR won it by launching Sputnik. Then USA launched the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) under the auspices the Department of Defense. Launching the ARPA is mainly focused to maintain a technological lead, particularly with regards to the military.



Packet Switching (1968)

USA wanted to expand the ARPA project to make it reliable at any time. Then the invented packet switching. National Physical Laboratory created the first packet switching network in 1968.



ARPANET (1969)

ARPA created ARPANET in 1969 to help ARPA-funded researchers collaborate more effectively for non profit uses like education and researches which were based on the packet switching technology built at the Rand Corporation in the early 1960s. The first ARPANET were positioned at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah in Salt Lake City.



TCP/IP (1983)

Between 1969 and 1983, a variety of individual networks sprouted and grew. (BITNET,CSNET). Connecting each of these independent networks was difficult, though, because they didn't use the same protocols and therefore couldn't exchange information.

As a result, ARPA commissioned the development of a new protocol called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that would allow different networks to connect.

Most networks had changed to TCP/IP in the late 1970s, but ARPANET didn't make the change until January 1, 1983. Thus, many folks consider that date as the birthday of the Internet.


NSF Creates NSFNET (1986)

In 1986 the National Science Foundation created NSFNET, an Internet backbone with a speed of 56K. This backbone connected five super-computing centers located at Princeton, Pittsburgh, UCSD, UIUC, and Cornell. NSFNET precipitated a large number of connections from various universities.

NSFNET has been updated continually since 1986. In 1988, two years after going online, the backbone was upgraded to T1 (1.544M). In 1991, it was upgraded to T3 (44.736M)

ARPANET Is Dismantled (1990)

Newer networks connected the sites that ARPANET connected, and thus ARPANET was no longer useful.

The World Wide Web (1992)

Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at CERN in Switzerland, invented the World Wide Web (Web) in 1992 as a way to organize information in a more brain-like fashion. His idea was to allow people to make multiple free associations with different bits of information.



NSF Establishes InterNIC (1993)

NSF created InterNIC, a group of businesses that provide a variety of essential services to the Internet.

The Internet Today

The growth of the Internet has been explosive. In 1985, there were about 2,000 host computers on the Internet. Now there are millions of host computers and many more millions of actual users. Now Internet isn't limited to educational and research purpose but also in too many fields like commercial and welfare services and etc.