The history of the Internet is the source of a wide range of networking efforts originating in several computer science laboratories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the TCP / IP set of network protocols to reach billions of users. The Internet was the work of dozens of pioneering scientists, programmers, and engineers who developed new features and technologies that eventually became the “information superhighway” we know today. A network of networks, today, the Internet acts as a global information communication system that connects millions of personal, public, academic and business networks with an international telecommunications backbone comprised of various electronic and optical networking technologies.
The Internet began in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. The United States Department of Defense awarded contracts in the early 1960s to develop the Arpanet project, led by Robert Taylor and operated by Lawrence Roberts. The first message was sent from Arnapet in 1969 to the second network node of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), from the laboratory of Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Computers in the ’60s were large and immobile and in use of the information stored on one of the computers, one has to travel to the computer’s site or transmit magnetic computer tape through the conventional postal system.
Another catalyst for the formation of the Internet was the heat of the Cold War. The launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite prompted the US State Department to consider how information could be transmitted even after a nuclear attack. Packet switching networks such as NPL Networks, ArpNet, Merit Networks, Cyclades and Telenet were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using various communication protocols. Donald Davis was the first to change the packet to the National Physics Laboratory (NPL) in 1967. In the UK, which has been the subject of experimental research in the UK for nearly two decades. ARPA-funded researchers today have developed a number of protocols used for Internet communications.
In the early 1980s, NSF funded the establishment of a national supercomputing center at several universities and provided interconnection through the NSFNET project in 1996, which created network access to research and educational institutions in the United States supercomputers. Commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s. January 1, 1983, is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Before that, different computer networks did not have a standard way of communicating with each other. After the invention of the World Wide Web by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, the online world took on a more recognized form. Although it is often confused on the Internet itself, the web is the most common way of accessing data online in the form of websites and hyperlinks. The NSFNET was abolished in 1995 by removing the latest Internet access restrictions for carrying commercial traffic. The landscape of global communications on the Internet has been historically fast, accounting for only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the first half, already 51% out of 2000 and more than 97% in 2007.
The Internet today is the primary prototype of comprehensive information infrastructure, often called a national information infrastructure. Today, the Internet continues to grow, driven by the amount of information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking online. However, regional differences can shape the future of global networks.
