Skip to content

World

History of the Internet

The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his “Galactic Network” concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA,4 starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.

The development on the internet started in the 1960s where goverment researchers was trying to find a way (Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, n.d). to share information. But the idea of a "world wireless system" came accross Nikola Tesla's mind way back in the early 1900s (Andrews, 2019). By that, we can somewhat agree that the concept of internet was already been thought a long time ago by great thinkers. That being said, here's some of the important years of the development of the internet and its events.

1960s

1961: Leonard Kleinrock at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) publishes the first paper on packet-switching theory—a theory that comes into use later for sending data through the Web.

1962: MIT computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider comes up with the idea for a global computer network. He later shares his idea with colleagues at the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) (Jefferson Online, 2016).

1965: Computers TX-2 in MIT and Q-32 in California are connected via a telephone network. With the first wide-area computer network comes the realization that time-sharing works well, although not over telephone networks (circuit switching), but through packet switching.

1967: Lawrence G. Roberts of MIT goes to Darpa, comes up with his plan for Arpanet and publishes it. MIT (1961-1967), RAND Corp. (1962-1965) and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the UK (1964-1967), all research in parallel about packet switching without knowledge of each other’s work.

1968: BBN Technologies wins a contract to build the first network switch. Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) was a group set up by former MIT professors and headed by Frank Heart.

1969: Four different nodes in different universities in California and Utah are connected—the University of Utah, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Stanford and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Charley Kline of UCLA sends the first Arpanet transmission to Bill Duvall of Stanford. He attempts to send “LOGIN", but the system crashes before he can reach “G". Only “LO" reaches.

1970s

1970: Packet-switched network Mark I is built to serve the NPL in the UK. Developed by Donald Davies, a Welshman and a colleague of Alan Turing while at NPL in the late 1940s.

1972: First program devoted to electronic mail (email) is created by Ray Tomlinson at BBN. The concept of ‘name@destination’ is created; Network Control Protocol (NCP) is also introduced to allow computers running on the same network to communicate with each other. First email sent out by Tomlinson is a test message; it isn’t preserved and he calls it insignificant, something like ‘QWERTYUIOP’.

1973: Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf collaborate to develop a protocol for linking multiple networks together. This later becomes the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a technology that links multiple networks together such that, if one network is brought down, the others do not collapse. While working at Xerox, Robert Metcalfe develops a system using cables that allows for transfer of more data over a network. He names this system Alto Aloha, but it later becomes known as Ethernet (Jefferson Online, 2016).

1974: Kahn and Cerf refer to the system as the Internet for the first time.

1976: AT&T Bell Labs develops UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) and UNIX.

1980s

1981: Metcalfe’s company 3Com announces Ethernet products for both computer workstations and personal computers; this allows for the establishment of local area networks (LANs) (Jefferson Online, 2016).

1982: The PhoneNet system is established and is connected to ARPANET and the first commercial network, Telenet. This broadens access to the internet and allows for email communication between multiple nations of the world (Jefferson Online, 2016).

1983: TCP/IP becomes the standard for Internet protocol. 1 January 1983 for this reason is celebrated as the unofficial birthday of the Internet.

1983: Domain Name System is introduced to allow domain names to automatically be assigned an IP number.

1990s

1990: ARPANET is decommissioned. Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN develop hypertext markup language (HTML) and the uniform resource locator (URL), giving birth to the first incarnation of the World Wide Web (Jefferson Online, 2016).

1990: Archie, the first search engine, is created at McGill University, Canada. Archie’s developer Peter Deutsch insists it is short for “archiver" and has nothing to do with the comic strip. Parker is disgusted when two follow-up search engines Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) and Jughead (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) are created.

1991: CERN releases the World Wide Web publicly on 6 August.

1993: The first Web browser, Mosaic (created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications), is released. Mosaic later becomes Netscape. Erwise, a browser developed by Finnish students, was created a year earlier, but discontinued due to a lack of funding.

1995: Microsoft launches Windows 95; Amazon, Yahoo and eBay all launch; Internet Explorer launches; and Java is created, allowing for animation on websites and creating a new flurry of internet activity (Jefferson Online, 2016).

1996: Congress passes the Communications Decency Act in an effort to combat the growing amount of objectionable material on the internet (Jefferson Online, 2016).

1996: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) begin appearing, such as Sprint and MCI.

1998: Google is founded (Jefferson Online, 2016).

1999: The music and video piracy controversy intensifies with the launch of Napster. The first internet virus capable of copying and sending itself to a user’s address book is discovered in 1999 (Jefferson Online, 2016).

2000s

2000: The rise and proliferation of Wi-Fi — wireless internet communication — as well as mobile internet devices like smartphones (Jefferson Online, 2016).

2004: Mark Zuckerberg launches the Facebook website.

2005: YouTube.com launches and the first-ever internet cat video came up (Zimmermann, Emspak, 2017).

2009: The Internet marks its 40th anniversary (Zimmermann, Emspak, 2017).

2010: Facebook reaches 400 million active users (Zimmermann, Emspak, 2017).

2010: The social media sites Pinterest and Instagram are launched (Zimmermann, Emspak, 2017).

2011: Twitter and Facebook play a large role in the Middle East revolts (Zimmermann, Emspak, 2017).

2013: 51% of U.S. adults report that they bank online, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center (Zimmermann, Emspak, 2017).

2015: Instagram, the photo-sharing site, reaches 400 million users, outpacing Twitter, which would go on to reach 316 million users by the middle of the same year (Zimmermann, Emspak, 2017).

2016: Google unveils Google Assistant (Zimmermann, Emspak, 2017).

2019: 5G mobile service was introduced by Verizon though the development has started from as early as 2015 (Verizon, 2019).

We're glad throughout the years amazing people have put out much effort in developing the internet. The developement of the internet is a journey that has yet to be completed. Who knows, maybe you'll be a part of its development someday.

References

  • Andrews, E. (2019, October 19). Who Invented the Internet? History. https://www.history.com/news/who-invented-the-internet#
  • Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.(n.d). A Brief History of the Internet. https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit07/internet07_02.phtml
  • Jefferson Online. (2016, November 22). FROM ARPANET TO WORLD WIDE WEB: AN INTERNET HISTORY TIMELINE. https://online.jefferson.edu/business/internet-history-timeline/#
  • Leiner, B. M., Cerf, V. G., Clark, D. D., Kahn, R. E., Kleinrock, L., Lynch, D. C., ... , Wolff, S. (1997). Brief History of the Internet. https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/
  • Livemint. (2015, July 8). A Brief History of the Internet. https://www.livemint.com/Industry/bQkp9arbe4mlaJHQA1xOjO/A-brief-history-of-the-Internet.html
  • Verizon. (2019, June 12). When was 5G introduced? https://www.verizon.com/about/our-company/5g/when-was-5g-introduced
  • Zimmermann, K A. Emspak, J. (2017, June 27). Internet History Timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web. https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html