A brief history of the internet
Internet prerunner: 1950’s
1958 – Bell telephone came out with a data service which made it possible to transmit data over standard phone lines
ARPANET: 1960’s
1961 – Leonard Kleinrock at MIT wrote “Information Flow in Large Communication Nets”, which was the very first paper written concerning packet switching theory..
1962 – Bell sold the very first modem, which could transmit data at 300bps
1962 – Joseph Licklider and Wesley Clark published a paper called “On-Line Man Computer Communication”, which provided the concept of a galactic network, which would be much like the internet today, i.e. allow many people to manipulate or view data over a huge network of interconnected computers.
1963 -Doug Engelbart comes up with
an online system which was able to perform browsing, editing through
hypertext and a few other operations that can be found in the internet
today. It should also be noted that he invented the mouse for use with
this system.
1964 – Paul Baran published On
Distributed Communications: Introduction to Distributed Communications
Network, which discussed packet switching networks. It also outlined
the concept of fault tolerance, or the fact that there is no one
computer responsible for the entirety of the internet. If one computer
fails, the internet continues.
1965 – Ted Nelson came up with the word hypertext.
1965 – Thomas
Marill and Lawrence Roberts were able to connect a computer at MIT’s
Lincoln Lab TX-2 to a computer at System Development Corporation’s Q-32
in California over a 1200bps telephone line. This was significant
because in doing this they created the first Wide Area Computer Network
(WAN)
1966 – Fiber optics were implemented as a medium for data transmission.
1966 – Donald Davies officially came up with the words for packets and packet switching.
1966 – Lawrence
G. Roberts published “Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared
Computers”, which was the first source of a plan for ARPANET..
1967 – A man named Wesley Clark designed and presented what today is commonly known as the router.
1967 – Andy van Dam with some help built the hypertext editing system (HES) and the File Retrieval and Editing System (FRESS)..
1967 – There
was an ACM symposium in Gatlinburg, TN about Operating System design
principles where Larry Roberts presented his first paper on the design
for ARPANET. Also, there were three packet teams present that dealt
with packet networking, including RAND, ARPA, and NPL.
1967 – NPL developed its first packet switching network, that had data speeds of 768kbps
1968 – NRL, located in Great Britain, devised the first WAN to use packet switching.
1968 – Lawrence
Roberts and DARPA came to a final plan and set of specifications for
ARPANET, and released a request for quotation, that BBN won, which was
basically a contract to produce the routers. It should be noted that
larger companies including ATT did not even bid on the contract, saying
such a network was impossible
1968 – To honor Leonard Kleinrock
and his early work with packet switching theory, the network
measurement center at UCLA which he headed up was selected as the first
node in the ARPANET.
1968 – Steve Crocker and his Network
Working Group (NWG) were formed and began working on protocols at the
host level that pertained to transmissions over ARPANET..
1969 – The Department of Defense commissioned ARPANET for research regarding networking
1969 – Four
nodes were added to ARAPANET, including UCLA, Stanford Research
Institute, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the
University of UTAH. It should be noted that the first connection,
between UCLA and Stanford, caused the Stanford computer to crash after
typing l and o of login
1970’s [TOP]
1970 – Crocker and the NWG devised the NCP, or Network Control Protocol, which was a host to host protocol
1970 – The
University of Hawaii developed ALOHANet, which laid some of the
framework for Ethernet and was also the first packet radio network
1970 – ATT installed the first link that went across the country between BBN and UCLA which had a data rate of 56kbps…
1971 – At this point, the ARAPANET contained about 15 sites and around 23 hosts, and averaged 700000 packets per day..
1971 – The file transfer protocol (FTP) was established..
1971 – The terminal interface processor (TIP) allowed remote computers to connect to the ARPANET.
1972 – The first inter-computer chat took place at UCLA
1972 – The first email program was implemented and introduced by Ray Tomlinson at BBN..
1972 – ARPANET was changed to DARPA, becoming a Defense Agency
1973 – The college of London became the first international college to connect to the ARPANET
1973 – A Harvard PHD student named Bob Metcalf outlined his ideas for ethernet.
1973 – At this point in time, the number of users of ARPANET was about 2000 and email constituted 75% of all ARPANET traffic
1974 – Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published their ideas which outlined the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
1975 – Satellites now allowed communication with Hawaii and the UK, and TCP tests were run over them.
1975 – Jon Postel made the observation that the implementation of mail programs would make it hard to filter and block junk mail.
1978 – The Internet Protocol(IP) branched off from TCP..
1979 – The USENET was established via UUCP between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. It’s founders were Tom Truscott, Steve Bellovin, and Jim Ellis..
1979 – A man named Kevin Mackenzie was the first to come up with and send an emoticon. It’s meaning was tounge-in-cheek and the symbol was -).
1980’s [TOP]
1981 – Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) was released.
1982 – The Department of Defense mandated that TCP/IP be standard for their networks.
1982 – EUNet was established in an effort to provide make email and the USENET available to Europe
1983 – The University of Wisconsin developed a name server which made it possible to connect to another computer without knowing its exact path, but instead use a computer nickname
1983 – The ARPANET divided into military and civilian sections, paving the way for the internet
1983 – The ping program was written by Mike Muuss.
1984 – The Domain Name Service (DNS) was first used.
1984 – In this year moderated newsgroups appeared as an addition to the USENET.
1984 – The number of hosts grew to over 10,000..
1985 – www.symbolics.com was the first domain to become registered
1986 -Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) was developed to increase USENET speed and efficiency.
1987 – The Christmas virus caused many problems simply by drawing a Christmas tree and sending itself to everyone in the host’s contact list.
1987 – The number of hosts grew to over 10,000..
1988 – The Internet Relay Chat(IRC) was developed by Jarkko Oikarinen.
1988 – The Internet Worm was released, which infected about 1/10th of all hosts on the internet..
1989 – The number of hosts on the internet grows to over 100,000..
1990’s [TOP]
1990 – ARPANET was decomissioned in this year..
1990 – world.std.com became the first company to provide dial-up internet access.
1990 – The “Internet toaster” was presented as the first non-computer mechanical device to be controlled via internet
1991 – WWW was released by a company called CERN. It allows users to view hypertext documents with a web browser.
1992 – There are now more than 1,000,000 hosts on the internet.
1992 – The World Bank became operational in this year.
1992 – The term “surfing the net” was coined in this year.
1992 – The Internet Society was started up.
1993 – The Whitehouse came on-line. It is interesting to note that Bill Clinton’s email became [email protected] and Al Gore’s was [email protected]..
1993 – The first broadcasts of internet talk radio appeared..
1994 – Some of the first website banners appeared for the purpose of advertising.
1994 – The first international WWW conferences were held
1994 – IPv6 was outlined and released, able to support many more computers and networks than before
1995 – A man named Chris Lamprecht was the first person to be banned from the internet by a judge in Texas.
1995 – The first macro virus appeared, and was located in a Microsoft Word document.
1995 – This was the first year that it began to cost money to register a domain name
1998 – The first use of internet postage stamps, where a user could buy, download, and print them
1998 – The first real time that internet users were able to be judges and decide the outcome of an event (ice skating)..
1998 – There are now over 3 million registered domain names on the web!
These events are a small snapshot of the infinitely many events that lead to the internet as we know it today!
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