A Brief History of the Internet
Download
Report
Transcript A Brief History of the Internet
A B RIEF H ISTORY OF THE
I NTERNET
1836: T ELEGRAPH
Patented by Cooke and Wheatstone.
Revolutionized human (tele)communications.
Morse Code—a series of dots and dashes—was
used to communicate between humans across a
long distance.
Required telegraph wires throughout the
country.
Though much slower, this was similar to how
computers communicate via binary (0/1) data
today.
1858-1866:
T RANSATLANTIC C ABLE
Allowed direct instantaneous communication
across the Atlantic Ocean via telegraph.
Today, transatlantic telegraph cables have been
replaced by transatlantic telecommunications
cables.
1876: T ELEPHONE
Exhibited by Alexander Graham Bell.
A telephone exchange or telephone switch is a
system of electronic components that connects
telephone calls.
The telephone exchange concept has been
adapted for use in Internet exchanges.
1957: S PUTNIK
USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth
satellite.
The start of global telecommunications. Satellites
play an important role in transmitting all sorts of
data today.
In response, US forms the Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department
of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science
and technology applicable to the military.
1962–1968: PACKET SWITCHING NETWORKS
The Internet relies on electrical “packets” to
transfer data.
The origin is military: for utmost security in
transferring information of networks.
Data is split into tiny packets that may take
different routes to a destination.
PACKET - SWITCHING
NETWORKS (C ONT.)
Notice the distinctions between a centralized,
decentralized, and distributed network.
Distributed networks:
Very hard to eavesdrop on messages.
More than one route available. If one route goes
down, another may be followed.
Can withstand large scale destruction (such as
nuclear attack—remember that this was the time
of the Cold War).
1969:
B IRTH OF THE I NTERNET
ARPANET is commissioned by Dept. of Defense
for research into networking.
First node developed at UCLA (Los Angeles)
closely followed by nodes at Stanford Research
Institute, UCSB (Santa Barbara) and U of Utah (4
Nodes).
The first transmission between two of these
computers occurred in 1969, and one of the
computers crashed a few characters in.
1971:
B IRTH OF E MAIL
15 nodes (23 hosts) on ARPANET.
E-mail invented—a program to send messages
across a distributed network.
E-mail is the main way of inter-personal
communication on the Internet today.
1972: F IRST P UBLIC
D EMONSTRATION
First public demonstration of ARPANET between
40 machines.
Internetworking Working Group (INWG) created
to address need for establishing agreed-upon
protocols.
Telnet specification created—Telnet is still a
relevant means of inter-machine connection
today.
1973–1988:
I NTERNET G ROWTH
Internet continues to grow exponentially, adding
more hubs and more methods of data sharing.
1973: File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
1974: Transmission Control Program (TCP)
1979: Newsgroups & Multiuser Dungeons (MUD)
1984: Domain name servers (DNS)
1987: Commercial use of Internet (28,000 hosts)
1989: T IM B ERNERS -L EE
Tim Berners-Lee of England (working at CERN in
Switzerland) wrote a proposal in March for "a
large hypertext database with typed links", but it
generated little interest from his boss and others.
The following year, his boss suggested he work
on it in his spare time.
1990:
I NVENTION OF THE W EB
By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the
tools necessary for a working Web:
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
A Web browser (which was also a Web editor)
A web server and HTTP server software
The first Web pages that described the project
itself.
1991: WWW R ELEASED TO
THE P UBLIC
Initially non-graphic.
Revolutionized modern communications and our
very way of life.
1993: T HE G RAPHICAL W EB
Mosaic took the Internet by storm. It was a userfriendly web browser which allows the display of
images.
Mosaic eventually led to Netscape browser.
2 million Internet hosts and 600 web sites in
1993.
1994:
T HE C OMMERCIAL W EB
Shopping malls and banks arrived on the web.
3 million Internet hosts and 10,000 web sites.
Most websites are static—providing for no user
interaction.
1996:
T HE M OBILE W EB
The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity
was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, launched in
Finland.
To make efficient use of the small screen and tiny
keypad, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP,
based on HTML) was created for mobile devices.
Nowadays, mobile devices such as smart phones
and tablets typically understand HTML and CSS.
2004:
W EB 2.0
Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Publishing coins the term
Web 2.0 to refer to cumulative changes in the
way websites work:
Interactivity
Information sharing
User-generated content
Collaboration
Photo and video sharing
Blogging