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What we today know as the Internet is a result of a series of developments over a period of several decades. The evolution of the Internet as a community of people all around the worlds and its current usage and applications have developed slowly and gradually, with each new discovery making its own little contribution to the process.
It all began with the ARPANET, which was the first computer network in world history. Before the ARPANET became a reality, however, what came first was the concept of Packet Switching. In the year 1962, Paul Baran was brought in from the RAND Cooperation into US Air Force (i.e., he was commissioned). The basic direction that his research was to take was to develop an idea for a special military network which could survive a nuclear attack and still recover all the data. Baran’s research led to the concept of a packet switched network. He defined packet switching as follows:
"Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."
Now, the contract for building the ARPANET was given to BBN. In 1969, the physical network was complete. It had four nodes or clients one each at the University of California (Los Angeles), SRI (Stanford), University of California (Santa Barbara) and the University of Utah. Connected together by 50Kbps circuits, this was the first ever computer network to come to reality.
Ray Tomlinson, who was also from BBN, made the first e-mail program in 1972. At this time, The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) came to be known as The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The major limitation with ARPANET was that allowed communication between hosts on the same network. This initiated the search for a better protocol system that would allow communication between any type of hosts or networks. Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf came up with the TCP/IP protocol in 1973 which solved this problem and it was here that the term Internet was first used. Once experiments proved the worthiness was this protocol, it was adapted by the ARPANET by 1976.
A breakthrough technology came in 1983 when The University of Wisconsin created Domain Name System (DNS). This system allowed the packets to have direction based on name, instead of crude addresses. These names were obviously easy to remember and hence, it revolutionized communication over the internet.
New developments continued and the world saw the change of the whole backbone on which the internet was based (i.e., the connection speeds and cables etc.). Around 1994, a new technology changed the whole face of the Internet, today called the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web or the WWW as it is better known as, is a vast collection of millions of ‘web pages’ that are linked to each other using what is called hyperlinks. These hyperlinks, when clicked, would take a person to another web page. It was made by Tim-Berners Lee at CERN and was actually released in 1992.The graphical interface of the WWW came from Marc Andreessen in 1993 when he introduced the world’s first browser, Mosaic.
In 1995, domain names, that is, website addresses began to be charged an annual fee of $50. At this time, the Internet had already become famous or rather, a rage. The WWW played a major role in making the Internet this much popular.
As of 2006, the Internet has evolved into a worldwide network containing a billion of pages that link to each other. There are many new features that can be seen that include Blogs, Photo Sharing, Wikis, Video and Audio sharing etc. Sending files along with emails (called Attachments) is no longer a trivial task.
The Internet, in all its capabilities, is changing the way people around the world communicate and interact with each other and has crossed international boundaries as if they were thin lines.
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