Internet History Essay, Research Paper

The Internet began by a vision of a psychologist named, SCR Licwriter in the 1950?s. Lickwriter was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His vision was to connect all the computers together so they would be more useful in sharing information. This vision was just a thought of imagination then. In 1958 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. The ARPAnet was designed for the government to use for research. Then it was in 1962 when Packet switching was introduced. This was used for the military for security in transferring information of networks. The Data was split into tiny packets and sent thru the network; this was called ?Hot potato routing? (Paul Baran). Data may take different routes to a certain destination. There was more than one route; this way if one went down there was another route the packet could take. Paul Baran invented this web like network.

In 1969 there was an ARPA scientist, Bob Taylor, who made the first network stem. On the date September 2, 1969 the first ever message was sent between two nodes on the ARPAnet. This was also the first net crash that ever happened. Time sharing started to happen, a person could sit at a computer and trade information with another computer, and the data would come back to them about two seconds later. Bob Taylor wanted to have it so that he could just use one computer to fix all three of the big machines he was responsible for. This is when he made a network for his company. He was given one million dollars to make this network happen. Him and a small team figured it out, but they couldn?t find anyone to bid on the project. The phone companies didn?t think that this was a good idea at all. They didn?t think it could be done and that if it could nobody would want to use this network ?thing?. The first node was going to be placed at UCLA (this was the Sigma 7) and then Stanford Research Institute (a SDS 940), UCSB (a IBM 360\75), and U of Utah (a PDP 10). Taylor asks over one hundred and forty companies to bid on this project, not one accepted. But, a small company known as BBM did accept this opportunity. On September 1,1969 the first mainframe was finally place into UCLA. By the end of 1969 all four machines were place in there location.

By April 1971 the ARPAnet had eighteen mainframes on the net around the country. This was the same year e-mail was programmed by Raymond Tomlinson. E-mail was actually two different programs put together for Tomlinson?s own personal use of his computer. This came unexpected to computer users, but in less than a year it became a very popular thing a lot of people used. He also made good use of the at (@) sign. He figure if a user was at somewhere, why not use the at sign. In 1972 the first demonstration of forty machines were presented in Washington. There were 19 different things a person could do on the network. Robert Metcalfe gave a tour of what actually the network could do, to ten high class ATT executives, but not everything went as planned. The system crashed, this is where they were glad that they didn?t buy into the deal. They thought it was quite amusing that they were right, it wasn?t going to work.

After the conference ended, the network took off. The number of computers and the different networks hooked up to the net started to multiply thru out the country. This is when Ben Surf and Bob Con set up procedures known as the Transmission Control Program, TCP/IP Protocol. That would allow different networks to send data packets back and forth to each other. In 1983 TCP/IP was made the standard protocol. ?This would become a mile stone for the internet.?(Dr. Vinton Cerf) Another big milestone for the Internet was June 9, 1992. Congress passing a bill that took the Internet out of the hands of the government, and gave it to the American people. By that November President George Bush signed the bill making it part of the law to let the public use the net. This unleashed a lot of competition and progress of the economy.

The same time congress was getting the bill passed; a Physics student named Tim Berners-lee in Switzerland invented the WWW (World Wide Web). Tim invented WWW because the network all around the world looked to him as a web that covered the world. That is why he called it ?The World Wide Web?. At first he was the only one that used this on his own computer in Switzerland. This made it easier to follow information around. This took off also like other small inventions that no one ever thought of when first creating the network. This was not very user friendly at first but it worked out its problems later. In 1992 there was only fifty web pages on the Internet. By 1997 there was over one million sites available for the web users. People use the net for almost anything. A Liberian, Jean Polly, thought of the term ?Surfing the Net?. She liked to get on the Internet and look thru the web pages that were available. She thought of this term because of her mouse pad. It had picture of a guy surfing on it.

But Mark Andreson, a twenty-two year old student introduced another invention in 1993.This very user-friendly software was used to browse the Internet, The Web Browser. The browser would let you jump and explore around the net a lot faster. This rocketed the Internet almost instantly. The Web grew almost three hundred and forty one thousand percent. The data that travels thru the net multiplies every one hundred days.

The Internet has everything form dating to shopping. A person can do almost anything on the web today. It?s away to get out of the house without even leaving.

The Internet Behind The WEB. History Channel, February 1999

History of the Internet and Web. December 4,1999.Online. Anthony Anderberg

http://www.geocities.com/~anderberg/ant/history/

Hobbes? Internet Timeline. March 22,2000.Online. Robert H? Zakon

http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html

The History of the Net. March 22,2000.Online.Henry Hardly

http://www.ocean.ic.net/ftp/doc/nethist.html