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Very Brief History Of The Internet


From it's days as a mostly military and college project to the Internet we know now, the transfer of information over the world wide web has been transformed into a global commercial cornerstone. It's ability to communicate quickly and efficiently through electronic mail (email) and IP telephone technology has become a crucial standard of communication.

In 1969 the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began experimenting in ways to share resources with other computer users in academic and government environments. What they created became known as ARPANET. ARPANET was used for things like emailing and airline reservations and was successful enough to inspire others to create their own networks of communication. One such network was set up by the computer science section of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1981 and was called the Computer Science Network (CSNET). CSNET was used as the first communication over the Internet between the US and European and Asian countries.

 

An Expanding Network Of Networks

During the 1980s the NSF began fuding work on it's supercomputing program which was meant to be twenty-five times quicker than CSNET. This technology became known as NSFNET and was released in 1986. In it's first year of release NSFNET was so successful and was transferring so much information that it was already in need of an upgrade. The transmission circuits that were used were provided by MCI and the software and hardware for the packet-switching network that was used in the upgrade was provided by IBM.

In efforts to merge these into one reliable non-proprietary network, technologies like TCP/IP were invented to make for a common network. While for computer aficionados technologies like USENET and gopher, an early precursor to the World Wide Web, were widely used, they were not popular with the main stream and were largely text based because sending multimedia data was cumbersome, and not appealing to the average consumer. Corporations could take advantage of email for communications but very few consumer applications of the Internet were available.

 

Early Years Of The Internet

Information About the Internet’s formative years:

Sir Tim-Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web (WWW) which marked the crucial step in transforming the Internet into the consumer driven commercial vehicle it is today. He created it in large part to justify the cost of a new workstation he'd requested. The workstation was a NeXT Cube and powered by the same operating system as Apple's popular Macintosh and iPhone are powered by today. He used this NeXT computer as the first Web Server and to create the first Web Browser.

The Mosaic Web Browser took this one step closer to being consumer accessible and laid the foundations of the Netscape Internet Browser. As the Web gained popularity existing Internet Service Providers like American Online and Compuserve added WWW to their Internet access suites. These networks were at the time highly proprietary and competed based on content and custom services, unlike Internet Providers today who compete largely based on price and consistent up-time.

 

Start Of The World Wide Web

Information About The Creation of the WWW:

There exist today many ways to access the Internet and WWW. In it's early stages the Internet was primarily accessed through a modem that would attach to a phone line and dial up to an Internet service provider. Movies of the 1980s often show cumbersome suitcase sized modems which would literally interact with the telephone itself rather than interfacing with the telephone wires.

This was a very poor means of transmitting information and quite prone to failure. Today though technologies like DSL, which is still reliant on telephone lines, Cable Internet modems, which use the broadband communications systems setup for cable television, and Satellite Internet modems, allow much faster and reliable Internet access while enabling data intensive applications like 3D video games to operate over the Internet. Wireless Internet both in the form of WiFi/802.* access points, and cell phone based technologies like 3G enable high speed access over mobile devices like cell phones, blackberries, the iPhone & iPod, as well as PDAs and MP3 players.

 

Modern Internet Access Technologies

If you're curious where the Internet is going, the following links highlight some of the current technologies which promise to grow rapidly in the next few years.

 
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