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In 1957, the Russians launched the first artificial satellite, which was called Sputnik. This event flamed up the cold war, because the United States was near hysterics thinking of that metal ball orbiting the globe overhead. But president D. Eisenhower and the U.S. didn't want the Russians to own outer space without a fight. So the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was initiated within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish U.S. lead in science and technology applicable to the military.
The ARPA focused specially on the development of the at that time fledgling computer technology. In this case the agency realized, that computers needed greater capability to interact with each other.
In 1961 the first breakthrough was made by scientists, who made it possible for several people to use the same computer simultaneously. The process, which has been developed, was called "time-sharing". However, the innovation was not a huge success, because the expectations were too high. Yet it was not possible for the time-sharing user to perform computing tasks on more than one remote system at a time, and the poor quality of telephone connections would often cause transmission errors.
In 1966 a new networking project was initiated. The proposal was to connect all computers in the research community via dial-up telephone lines. At the same time the project became aware of a number of reports published in 1962 by Paul Baran, as well as unrelated but yet almost identical pioneering networking experiments conducted in the U.K by Donald Watts. These concerned the possibilities of using a packet-switching process in order to secure the survivability of military command and control systems. The principle relied on a peer to peer computer network, in which all computers had equal status and data-forwarding capabilities. If a user wanted to transmit data from one computer to another, regardless of the distance, the transmitting computer would break up the data in small packets measuring only a few bytes. These packets were unique, in the sense that they all contained information as to their point of origin, their destination, as well as information which would enable the receiving computer to reassemble the data as soon as all packets had arrived.
Above the packet-switching principle ARPA succeeded in 1969 in creating the first effective long distance network, and it was appropriately named the ARPANET. The original network had four users (UCLA, UCSB, SRI and University of Utah).
During the 1970s the ARPANET was constantly evolving in size and stability, and spawned a number of seminal developments. Among the most noteworthy was electronic mail (e-mail), developed by Ray Tomlinson in 1972, and the establishment of a transatlantic connection in 1973. In addition work was undertaken to improve the basic communication protocols to ensure the stability of ARPANET. Furthermore the constant growth of the network brought up the need for a set of new communication protocols. In 1982 TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) was introduced, which is still the most used protocol on the Internet today.
The years surrounding 1980 contained several important events. One was the initial military acceptance and usage of packet-switching networks taking place late in 1978, another one the creation of the Usenet in 1979. Especially the second event accommodated a wide number of interests, because through the Usenet discussion groups, which were distributed between a growing number of academic institutions, were established. It enabled participants to read and post information and opinions in what became later known as the Usenet Newsgroups.
The creation of CSNET and BITNET in the early Eighties signaled that the universities had begun to perceive networking as an essential tool for the research community. This prompted the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a new transcontinental network in 1986. A network catering to academic institutions and military researchers, which was connected to the NSF 'backbone' and to a similar network developed by the NASA. By 1989 the number of 'host' computers connected to the NSFNET had ballooned to more than 28,000 - mostly institutional users. The system was largely used and paid for by NASA, the NSF and several different universities.
Today's Internet took off in 1989 with the arrival of the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) developed by a Swiss physicist at the European Center for Particle Research (CERN).
Then in 1993 an American undergraduate wrote a program called MOSAIC which used a 'hypertext' system (HTTP) to link documents (text, images, sound and video) to each other. His system eventually became Netscape, currently one of the most popular Web 'browsers'. As soon as software became available for the more common operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or Apple Macintosh, this new tool was immediately picked up by the Internet community. The growth of the Internet began ...
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