from its conceptual beginnings through the present
Contents --
Computers, although relatively new to the scene, were already in extensive use by the US government in mid 1940s and through the end of the decade.
The computers during this time period were owned and operated independently. Most of the computers were being used for a specific purpose, although the idea of using the computer for many purposes emerged during this same time period. It was during the 50's that the idea of using multiple processors began to emerge. Also during this period, computer companies were creating Operating Systems and languages, like the Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL), emerged.
This period of history saw the beginnings of several computer companies; however, the leader during this time was a company named Independent Business Machines (IBM). Interestingly, the early 50's in the computer industry was an exciting time. There was research being performed that toyed with the idea of creating and using analog type computers (using sound wave variation signals, like the telephone) instead of the digital technology that was leading the market.
As pointed out, the use of computers during this period was strictly in-house. Government agencies and private companies used their computers for their own purposes. Owning a computer during these times was a sign of great 'modernization' and pride. The idea of joining computer resources together between companies wasn't even considered.
This idea of tying computers together, to exchange information and share resources, wasn't seriously considered till the early 1960s.
The mid 1960s were fairly quiet, although they did usher in a couple of interesting items. During this period, we saw the emergence of the concept known as hypertext. Hypertext, some identifiable text that is embedded within a document, is used as a pointer, allowing a user to move from within the current document to another (related to the identifiable hypertext). Today this movement is accomplished by clicking on the hypertext, usually identified as underlined text in the document. In addition, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation wrote his famous paper -- "On Distributed Communications Networks". This paper clearly spelled out how independent networks could be inter-related. This gave rise to the reality of Packet-switching networks.
1967
Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System. Also during 1967, a plan was presented for a packet-switching network to the ACM Symposium on Operating Principles.
1968
Doug Engelbart demonstrates a hypertext system named NLS. Late 1968, a network presentation was given to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an agency of the Department of Defense.
The late 1960s saw a significant increase in interest for linking computer resources together. This was mostly driven by the United States government. By 1969, the US Government had allocated serious financial resources for experimentation. The purpose of this research was primarly focused on linking several critical computer networks together. These computers included several owned by the Government and some in use at a few Universities throughout the country.
The network used a protocol known as Network Control Protocol (NCP) operating through Information Message Processors (IMP). NCP was developed by Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN). The first node was located at UCLA and soon after at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UCSB, and U of Utah.
E-mail, became the primary personal use purpose of the researches on the ARPANet. It was an instant revolution, offering the ability to send detailed letters at the speed of a telephone call.
DARPA developed a software oriented protocol that allowed different computer types to communicate. It was known as TCP/IP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. It was the language to be used on the Internet. It began as an experiment in inter-networking different types of networks and computer systems. This single rule, or protocol method, through the backing of the US Government, allowed many different computer networks to 'inter' connect via one method. This TCP/IP protocol allowed for the transferring of files via a packet based system. It used this same packet system to transfer both binary files (like programs) and text based files (like e-mail).
APARNet continues to grow and by the late 70s, includes international connections to England and Norway. Her Majesty, Elizabeth, Queen of the United Kingdom uses the 'Internet' to send out an e-mail.
1971
ARPANet continues to grow. It now consisted of 1 5 nodes (23 hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, U of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND Corp., SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, and NASA/Ames.
Project Gutenberg was begun. Its goal was to make more than 10,000 books and other documents (of historical value) available electronically by the year 2001. It is coordinated by Michael Hart, and maintains a library of stories and books from "Aesop's Fables" to "Through the Looking Glass". It also has the CIA's annual "World Factbook" almanac. All of these books are available for anyone to download and use.
1972
The International Conference on Computer Communications demonstrated use of ARPANET between 40 machines. Also during this same year the InterNetworking Working Group (INWG) was created to address the need to establishs an agreed upon protocols. It was
chaired by Vinton Cerf.
1973
The first international connections were added to the ARPANet. Now ARPANet included England and Norway.
1975
ZOG, a distributed hypermedia system was debuted at Carnegie-Mellon university. It is now known as KMS. The BBN also opens Telenet, which was the commercial version of ARPANet.
1976
UUCP (for Unix-to-Unix CoPy) was conceived and created by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis at Duke University in North Carolina. Its purpose was to distribute information of interest to people among the Unix community, thus decentralizing the organization of
information among Unix computers worldwide.
1977
AT&T distributes uucp with UNIX. During this same period, THEORYNet was created at U of Wisconsin providing electronic mail to over 100 researchers in computer science (using uucp).
1977
The Aspen Movie Map was demonstrated by MIT's Architecture Machine Group. This was the first hypermedia video-disk system.
1979
A meeting was held between U of Wisconsin, DARPA, NSF, and computer scientists from many universities to establish a Computer Science Department research computer network.
USENET was established, using uucp, operating between Duke Univ. and U of North Carolina.
By the close of the 1970s, using TCP/IP as the protocol, the ARPANet and computers that were its counterpart in other countries were connected together. The world was finally tied together in a single computer Web.
Due to the high cost of connecting during the early 1980s, many coordinated networks, such as Computer Science Network (CSNET) and BITNET began to provide users in the USA, nationwide networking capabilities, sharing the cost of connections, lowering individual costs. This allowed to the academic and research community, as well as many businesses to also connect their computers to this worldwide Net. Although these systems were separate computer networks, they were connected to the Internet, via a provider service, for the purpose of exchanging information between the different communities.
The ARPANet split into two separate networks, the ARPANET and Milnet (an unclassified military network) during the early 1980s. Although separate networks, they continued to stayed interconnected, allowing communication between the networks to continue.
During this same time, another 'open' protocol suite (vs. TCP/IP) was created. The International Organization for Standards (ISO) developed the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocols.
USENET was quickly growing out of control during the early 1980s. It became huge over night. Almost a complete encyclopedia of information in writing was being transmitted daily -- pumping through 10s of millions of characters per day. A hierarchy was created that would arrange conferences on the USENET. These conferences were referred to as Newsgroups for the first time. Each Newsgroup would focus on a single broad topic -- like the comp newgroup focuses on computer related topics.
Mark Horton, a graduate student at Berkely and Matt Glickmann, a local high school student at the time, released a new UseNet software program that would allow for volumes of posting daily.
BITNET, the "Because Its Time (There) NETwork", was started as a cooperative network at the City University of New York. It provided electronic mail and listserv servers to distribute information. Unlike USENET, where client software is needed, electronic mail was the only tool necessary to use BITNET.
CSNET (Computer Science NETwork) comes into being providing dial up capabilities to electronic mail. Since many universities were feeling left out of ARPANET, they quickly joined CSNET.
1982
The NWG establishes the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the official protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET. This lead to one of the first definition of an "internet" as a connected set of networks,
specifically those using TCP/IP, and "Internet" as connected TCP/IP internets.
1983
ARPANet was using the TCP/IP protocol ubiquitously. It was the protocol of use every where. It became the defacto standard and DARPA decided that it would be the required method of connection for future systems.
Name servers were developed at U of Wisconsin. This was an important break through, using a name server, there was no longer a need to know the exact path to a system. This meant that users could get to another computer system without having to know the exact path.
A gateway as put in place between CSNET and ARPANet, and ARPANet was split into ARPANET and MILNET with the latter becoming integrated with the Defense Data Network created the previous year.
Desktop workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX which includes IP networking software.
The Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) computers began to use the TCP/IP protocol for the Unix operating system. Since it was developed using public funds, it was considered an open, non-propriety protocol. It was in public domain and was made available at no cost for computers. They official released version 4.2BSD incorporating TCP/IP.
The need to connect large time sharing computers to the Internet begins to change. Now users want to connect entire local networks to the Internet at each site.
1984
The Domain Name Server (DNS) was introduced, based on Name Servers developed at U of Wisconsin the year before. The number of hosts on the Net broke 1,000 during this year.
Telos Inc. introduces Filevision the hypermedia database for the Macintosh.
1985
Janet Walker creates the Symbolics Document Examiner.
Intermedia, a hypermedia system, was conceived at Brown University by Norman Meyrowitz and his associates.
1986
The OWL group introduces GUIDE, a hypermedia document browser.
The birth of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET). NSFNET came into being with the aid of NASA and DOE. It was used to link researchers across the USA with five supercomputer centers. It expanded to include the mid-level and statewide academic networks that connected universities and research consortiums. Due to ARPANet's continued bureaucracy, it was not being used to interconnect centers and NSFNET. Because of the bureaucracy, NSFNET began to replace the ARPANET for research networking. It had an initial backbone speed of 56K. During this same time, the Cleveland Freenet (which was the start of NPTN) comes on line.
1987
NSF signed a cooperative agreement to manage the NSFNET backbone with three private sector corporations --- IBM, MCI, and Merit Network, Inc.
The number of hosts on the Net broke 10,000 and the number of BITNET hosts broke the 1,000 barrier.
Apple Computer, Inc. introduces HyperCard, the first widely available personal hypermedia authoring system.
The Hypertext '87 Workshop is held in North Carolina
1988
The first Internet worm began burrowing through the Net.
Internet Relay Chat, or simply Chat, was written by a Jarkko Oikarinen in Finland. It was designed as a replacement for the "talk" program of the Internet.
1989
The number of hosts on the Net broke 100,000 and NSFNET backbone was upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps).
A lot of activity began to be notice from the European community -- RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeans) was formed by European service providers. It was formed to ensure the necessary administrative and technical coordination to allow the operation of the pan European IP Network.
Also in Europe, Tim Bernes-Lee of the European Particle Physics Laboratory (known as CERN, a collective of Europena high-energy physics researchers) proposed the World-Wide Web project, also known as the Web or W3, as a means of transporting research and ideas efficiently throughout the organization.
Its sole goal was to effectively communicate this information between research sites for physicists. Unlike 'traditional' use of the Internet, the Web was conceived as a way to connect with other members of the community using a single program and Hyper Text language that would allow for the transportation and viewing of both text and graphics. Prior to this concept, e-mail would let you transfer text and FTP (file transfer protocol) would let you transfer binary data like graphics and programs. Its concept also supported the idea of using selections from a screen instead of having to use cryptic Unix commands, that required memorizing.
Tim Berners-Lee came up with a language, known as HyperText Markup Language (HTML), that lets someone develop a document (text and graphics) and embed pointers to related resources. This concept was known as a hyperlink -- linking from one document to another somewhere on the Internet, by clicking on some text identified in the document in a different color, underlined, or somehow highlighted. It was revolutionary, this concept of hperlinking would allow users to move from subject to subject by simply clicking on a single reference on a document of text and pictures.
It was like going to an encyclopedia and looking up an article. If you want to learn about space exploration you would reach for the "S" volume. While reading about space exploration you see a reference to the planet Mercury and want to see more about Mercury ... so you reach for the "M" volume and read about Mercury. Finally you return to the "S" volume to continue reading about space.
Autodesk, the major CAD software manufacturer, takes on Xanadu as a project.
The ARPANET was honorably dismantled.
The first relay between a commercial electronic mail carrier (MCI Mail) and the Internet through the Clearinghouse for Networked Information was introduced.
Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by Mitch Kapor, for the purpose of distributing information to any and all members of the Internet community.
By the end of 1990, the first piece of Web software was introduced on a NeXT machine. It had the capability to view and transmit hypertext documents to other people on the Internet. The CERN committee was given demonstrations of this first Web 'browser' at the Hypertext -91 conference.
1991
SCNET (the SCience NETwork) realized that most of its early members, the computer science departments of America, were connected via the NSFNET, so it also ceased to exist.
WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) was released by Thinking Machines Corporation and Gopher was released by U of Minnesota.
1992
Autodesk gave up on the Xanadu project, dropping it.
The Internet Society was officially chartered and the World Wide Web was released by CERN.
The number of hosts broke 1,000,000 and the NSFNET backbone was upgraded to T3 (44,736Mbps).
1993
InterNIC was created to provide specific Internet services, registering Host sites and directory and database services were introduced by AT&T.
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The United States White House comes on-line with three important email addresses:
1.President Bill Clinton: president@whitehouse.gov
2.Vice-President Al Gore: vice-president@whitehouse.gov
3.First Lady Hillary Clinton: root@whitehouse.gov
Internet Talk Radio begins broadcasting and businesses and media begin to actively take notice of the Internet.
A Hard Day's Night became the first full-length movie to be transcribed into a hypertext format and distributed via compact disk.
The International Workshop on Hypermedia and Hypertext Standards was held in Amsterdam, in April.
The first easily used and widely available Web browser was created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), named Mosaic, was made widely available in June 1993. This browser exploded on the scene as the most used piece of software on the Internet. It became the Web browser of choice for people working on the computers that had graphics capabilities. It was, and still is a non-commercial application. It operates on a wide range of computer platforms, including UNIX based machines like Sun, Silicon Graphics and DEC workstations, as well as, IBM-compatibles running Windows and Macintosh computers.
The first World-Wide Web developer's conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Hypertext Conference was held in Seattle, Washington and Ted Nelson speaks as the guest of honor.
Carl Malamud, founder of the Internet Multicasting Service, and Marshall Rose, a computer consultant, created a mechanism for translating Internet e-mail messages into faxes. It began as an experiment that would allow people to fax documents through out the world via the Internet.
1994
The World-Wide Web byte traffic surpasses the leading Gopher traffic on the NSFnet. The US Senate and State of California provide information servers allowing the community access to information.
The First International World-Wide Web conference was held in Geneva.
Jim Clark and Mark Andressen form a new company known as Mosaic Communication s Corporation.
Vancouver, Canada was the host for the World Conference on Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia.
European Conference on Hypermedia Technology was held in Edinburg, Scotland.
1996-1997
. . . and the History of the Internet continues to be written ...
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