The Internet began as a US government-funded network for communication in case of a nuclear attack. Visionaries like Licklider, Kleinrock, and Roberts contributed to its development, with ARPANET considered synonymous with its origins. TCP/IP protocols allowed commercial entities and LANs to connect to WANs. Berners-Lee’s hypertext language ushered in the World Wide Web, and Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was the first successful graphical browser. Private services like CompuServ and AOL offered access after NSF discontinued sponsorship in 1995.
The Internet has evolved over time into what it is today, but it started as a computer network funded by the US government. It was intended to provide a non-located and redundant means of communication between military, scientific, educational and governmental entities, in the event of a nuclear attack. Ideas for the Internet developed around the same time in many places and involved many visionaries, only a few of whom are mentioned here.
In 1962, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915-1990), an American computer scientist at MIT, envisioned a worldwide network of computers that could easily communicate with each other. Licklider soon moved to the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to oversee its development. From this point on many people have been involved in the development of the Internet in its various stages.
In short, Leonard Kleinrock of MIT was instrumental in devising packet switching, the means by which data moves across the Internet. Another person active in the origins of the Internet was Lawrence Roberts, also from MIT. In 1965, he used dial-up to connect a computer in Massachusetts to one in California. Although he didn’t use packet switching, it became apparent that this technology would be needed as opposed to the inadequate circuit switching used by the telephone company.
Roberts joined DARPA in 1966 to help develop the first packet-switched network under the new Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). ARPANET is considered synonymous with the origins of the Internet. Other people have also been involved in this venture and have made significant contributions to the technology.
The nascent ARPA network, consisting of four nodes (computers), was successfully connected on December 5, 1969. Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) developed in the 1970s, were fully implemented on the day New Year’s Eve in 1983. These protocols opened up the network to commercial entities and allowed local area networks (LANs) to connect to wide area networks (WANs), critical in the evolution of the Internet.
There were several other significant developments in the early years involving other protocols separate from the Internet, but working within it. These included e-mail and the network news transfer protocol (NNTP), which allowed users to exchange information in newsgroups over a user network (USENET). Telnet and file transfer protocol (FTP) were two other protocols in use, and Internet relay chat (IRC) was implemented in 1988.
However, in the beginning, the internet was far from easy to use. CERN’s Tim Berners-Lee would change that by proposing a hypertext language, implemented in 1991. This ushered in the World Wide Web and opened the world to graphical navigation and point-and-click navigation. In November 1992, Delphi made its mark by becoming the first nationwide commercial provider to offer its customers Internet access.
In October 1994, the first Internet users received the initial release of Mosaic Netscape 0.9, the first highly successful graphical Web browser. Launched by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, the browser would later become Netscape Navigator. Microsoft soon released Internet Explorer®, although Netscape Navigator remained in favor until Microsoft began integrating its browser into the ubiquitous Windows® operating systems.
In 1995, the National Science Foundation (NSF), which had funded the Internet backbone for non-commercial purposes, discontinued the sponsorship. Private services such as CompuServ, AOL, and Prodigy all offered pipelines to the Internet, and commercially available software allowed anyone to automatically configure their computer for Internet use.
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