Last updated: 10/13/00
Link back to course Welcome

A Brief History of the Internet
David Bowen, ISP

Early Stages
The Internet started in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At this time, the first Local Area Networks (LANs) were being developed. These were networks connecting people in the same office, building, or cluster of buildings ("campus"). Using LANs, several people could share files on a large central hard drive, share printers, and share other expensive computer equipment. Several companies started developing and marketing their own LAN technologies, with different strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, each company's technology was incompatible with the others. Many new companies started, to connect the different types. At the same time, Wide Area Networks (WANs) were being developed to connect, for example, one company's offices in different cities. There were different brands, again incompatible. A third element was that the US Department of Defense (DoD) decided that computer communications would be important in the future, especially if the US were attacked with nuclear weapons, and that computer communications needed to be impervious to large-scale disruptions. The US government, including the DoD, was finding it increasingly difficult to deal with the incompatibilities of the different LANs.

In response to all of these conerns, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA - later on, Defense was added at the start of its title, so it became DARPA) within DoD, started carrying out and funding research on networks. Besides theoretical discussions, there was heavy emphasis on building real examples. An Internetwork concept arose, of a network that would connect all of the LANs. Researchers and Suppliers were required soon to make all of their results public, using the new technology. The new network was called ARPANET. In 1983, the Internet, as it was called by then, absorbed ARPANET.

Since the developers were also required to be users, deficiencies and problems were identified and corrected. The TCP/IP protocol was developed, piece by piece. The Domain Name System was added on. Applications were developed. During the late 1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF), which at the time funded most non-military mathematics and science research, established five supercomputer centers at large universities around the nation, and used the Internet to connect researchers from all over the country, in what was known as NSFNET. In 1987, Michigan's Merit Network was awarded the contract to manage and upgrade these networks.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web to share text-only information among physics researchers centered around the CERN particle accelerator is Switzerland. Starting from a single web server, usage grew quickly, and accelerated when the National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first graphical browser, in 1993, which was commercialized in 1994 as Netscape. Today, the Web accounts for most traffic on the Internet, followed by email (but much email is web-based and so counted for the Web).

The Internet is simply a pipeline for information. Without software to insert and extract information, it would not be useful. Protocols have also been important in defining what functions Internet applications carry out, and how they do it. In this way, for example, there can be many different examples of Internet email clients and Internet email servers, but since the protocol defining how they interact is public, they can all work together. Some of the important applications, each with its own protocol, have been:

• Ping "bounces" a packet off of a remote computer, verifying that the local computer, the Internet connection, and the remote computer are all working.
• With email, users can send files (messages) to each other.
• With telnet, a user with an account (User Name and Password) on a remote computer can log on to the remote computer and run it, for allowed functions and directories. Telnet is limited to a command line interface, like the old DOS command line.
• Gopher ("go for") was an early version of the web, exchanging text files only. Users could carry out searches. Links and content had to be in separate files. Another program of this type was Archie.
• FTP, or File Transport Protocol, is used to view directories and files, and to transfer files between computers.
• The World Wide Web protocol was developed in 1993. Tim Berners-Lee is universally given credit for this. He saw the need for a universal method for information interchange incorporating text, graphics and links in the same file, without the need for a central registry of links. This last charactersitic allows anyone with Internet access to start a web server, without needing to ask permission or even file an application. This has contributed strongly to the growth of the Web, and the growth of the Internet.

Several informal volunteer groups are primarily responsible for developing and publishing the specifications that define the Internet. These are:

• IETF - Internet Engineering Task Force. Technical specifications for the Internet such as the various versions of the TCP/IP protocol. The current version if ipv4, Internet Protocol Version 4.
• IAB - Internet Advisory Board. Mkes rules about allocating IP addresses
• ISOC - Internet Society. Overall Internet direction.
• WWWC (W³C) - World Wide Web Consortium. Sets standards for the World Wide Web or "web", including the various versions of HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

Many people feel that the following characteristics contributed importantly to the success of the Internet:

• A technology-forcing and coordinating role by the Federal Government, with an open community of developers.
• Open, published standards
• Freedom to use the technology for proprietary and profit-making purposes
• Methods for growth, such as adding new users, are decentralized
• Universal scheme for connecting computers to exchange information

Two new features being developed are:

• ipv6, Internet Protocol Version 6. ipv5 is being skipped. ipv4 uses four bytes to define an IP address, allowing slightly more than four billion addresses (4 × 10⁹). We are running short of these (Why? Isn't it enough if every person on earth can have one?). ipv6 will use 32 bytes for an IP address, allowing 3 × 10⁷⁶ addresses, a 3 followed by 76 zeroes. Everyone hopes that this will be enough!
• Internet2, about one hundred to one thousand times faster than the present Internet. Wayne State University is a member of the group developing this. It will certainly incorporate multimedia as a part of the core protocol, instead of an add-on as with the present Internet.