Internet History

Many people believe one of the greatest inventions of all time has been the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Internet is a world-wide computer network and it provides a variety of information and communication services. It consists of interconnected networks using special communication protocols, or rules.

The Internet includes the World Wide Web (WWW), which allows documents to be connected to other documents by things called links. The links enable a user of the WWW to search for information from one document to another. Many people believe the Internet and the World Wide Web is the same thing, but it is not. The WWW is a portion of the Internet and is the way of accessing information over the medium called the Internet.

One can think of it as television shows and broadcast networks. The broadcast networks carry the TV shows in the same way the Internet carries the web pages for people to browse through or use, just like when people browse and watch shows and movies on a TV.

The invention of the Internet took many years, but it can be traced back to the 1960s, when the USSR (Soviet Russia), launched a satellite into space called Sputnik. The launch motivated scientists and researchers in the United States to begin exploring new technology which led to the early beginnings of the Internet.

In 1965, two computers at MIT began to 'communicate' with each other using technology called packet-switching. In 1969, the United States Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARAPNET) became involved and funded research which developed many of the protocols used for Internet communication today.

On October 29, 1969, an attempt of sending the first message takes place from the Stanford Research Institute to several other universities, however, the first message was unable to be sent because the system crashed. Nevertheless, the second attempt was successful. The Internet was born, but it was mostly between universities which were part of the ARAPNET.

There is not one single person responsible for the 'invention' of the computer or the Internet. However, the idea of the Internet has been credited to Leonard Kleinrock, based on a paper he published in 1961. And when the Internet of today began to be developed in the late 1960s, the people credited with the invention of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), (the rules for the Internet) was Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf. In addition, Tim Berners-Lee first introduced the World Wide Web (WWW) to the public on August 6, 1991, with a series of sites and pages related to the links.

The Internet Domain Name System was established in 1983 using address endings such as .edu, .com, .org, .gov, and many others. The first dot-com domain name was registered two years later, March 15, 1985 by Symbolics.com, which was a computer corporation in Massachusetts. In 1993 there were just 600 active websites but 24 years later in 2017, the number of active websites reached nearly one billion.

The Internet and the World Wide Web, and the thousands of applications used by billions of people throughout the world today, would not be possible without the contributions of many, many people. The Internet and web continues to grow and change, but one thing is certain, it has changed the lives of people everywhere.