The Media Forest 8 Blog

How Did The Internet Start?

Posted on 20. Aug, 2010 by admin in Internet

In a day and age where information is passed from person to person at lightening speeds we often take for grant it where it all came from. We can now talk face to face with relatives across oceans, interact with business in virtual meetings and shop in online mega malls such as Amazon.com. Websites like Facebook and Google have changed not only how we, as human beings, get our information but more importantly how we live our lives.

Technological advancements on the internet are occurring faster and faster and too often we forget to stop and wonder, “Where did it all come from”.

If you are talking to Al Gore, you may get the impression that it all was his idea. According to CNN Gore claims to have “took the initiative in creating the Internet”. Both as a Senator and as Vice President of the United States he actively promoted the development of the Internet and was a big proponent of the new technology.

How did the Internet get started? Well, believe it or not, it was started with a tiny Soviet orb called, Sputnik (the first man-made satellite). At this time the cold war was at it’s worst and the US and Russia were looking to edge the other out on technological developments. We, as a nation, worried that if the Soviets were able to launch a satellite into orbit that they could for sure fire a missile at us.

Sputnik’s launch prompted Dwight D. Eisenhower to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958. The purpose of the organization was to give the US a technological edge over its Cold War opponent.

Remember the first computers? They were mammoth machines that filled entire buildings. These primitive computers were exponentially larger then what we have today and were capable of but a fraction of the processing power of your PDA. These first computers either read magnetic tape or punch cards as a way of understanding data. At this time there was no way to network a group of computers together. ARPA set out to change this.

They enlisted the assistance of a technology company BBN to help them accomplish this goal. They set out to connect four different computers running on four different operating systems. This first primitive network was called, ARPANET.

With the absence of ARPANET we may not have the Internet, as we see it, today. ARPANET was not the only agency set out to accomplish this task but they established the protocols used by what we recognize as the “Internet” today.

Engineers were looking for a way to connect ARPANET to the packet radio network (PRNET). PRNET connected computers through radio transmitters and receivers. Rather than sending information through telephone lines the computers used radio waves. It took engineers about 3 years but in 1967 engineers were able to successfully connect two separate networks together.

By 1977, engineers had joined the Satellite Network (SATNET) to the other two networks. The term they came up with for connecting multiple networks together was inter-networking (Internet for short). Quickly following was the inclusion of USENET, BITNET, CSNET AND NSFNET (other computer networks).

Now that we have established a primitive version of the Internet it was still tough to navigate and sort through different types of data. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee developed a way to navigate the Internet in a user friendly manner. This system became known as the world wide web. Don’t get confused, the Internet is not the world wide web. The world wide web is one portion of the massively expanding Internet.

The first true Internet users were government and military personnel, graduate students and computer scientists (This is probably why the first websites ended in .edu). With the addition of the world wide web the Internet became much more accessible to everyday people. Colleges were the first to truly connect to the world wide web for use in education. Businesses soon followed. By 1994 we see that Internet commerce or eCommerce actually became a reality!

The Internet today connects almost anything and everything including cell phones, pda, lap top, satellites, etc. This massive network of computers is millions of times larger and more detailed than the original ARPANET and has truly changed how most of us in the world communicate and interact with each other.

From the Media Forest 8 team we would like to thank ARPANET. Without them, we would not exist!