Users With Access to Internet

Have you ever wondered where the Internet came from? 

Let’s run through a timeline of the Internet history

1947 

• The Cold War – During this conflict between the Western Bloc, led by the USA, and the Eastern Bloc, led by the Soviet Union (now Russia), both nations were increasing their technological capabilities to prevent nuclear attacks from the other.
  At this time, computers were large enough to occupy entire rooms. Researchers had to travel long distances and needed to get the computers connected to transfer data easily. This is how the Internet looked initially.
  

1958 

• Eisenhower, the President of the USA, created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a research and development agency of the Department of Defense, in response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik 1 in 1957. 

1961

• The packet switching theory developed by Leonard Kleinrock, was one of the first important steps towards building the Internet. It was described as information broken down into packets of data, addressed to a receiver, transferred from one computer to another via a computer network, and then reassembled upon delivery to the receiver.

1962 

• J.C.R Licklider from MIT (USA) wrote a series of memos with his concept of the “Galactic Network”, a network of computers to gather data and access programs anywhere in the world. He took his theory further saying that computers would be an efficient method of human communication. This research and ideas were crucial in the early development of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. 

1965

• The TX-2 computer in Massachusetts was connected to the Q-32 computer in California with a low-speed dial-up telephone line creating the first wide-area computer network ever built. It resulted in the creation of time-shared computers.

1969 

• University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) was selected to be the first node of ARPANET. The first host computer was connected. A second node was provided at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). One month later, the computer at Stanford was connected to the ARPANET, and the first host-to-host message was sent from UCLA to SRI.  
• Shortly after, 4 US Universities were successfully connected. Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years.

1972

• The network now encompassed 50 universities and research centers throughout the United States. The electronic mail was introduced that year. One year later, ARPANET had successfully established connections with other countries including England and Norway.

What does “Internet” mean?

The name “Internet” is a combination of the words “interconnection” and “network.”

So, when did the Internet first become available to everyone?

January 1st, 1983 is considered to be the birth of “the Internet”. ARPANET was divided into two networks: military and civilian use. The word Internet was first used to describe the combination of these two networks. The United States Department of Defense decided to use TCP/IP protocol in their ARPANET network, thereby creating the ARPA Internet network. Over the years, it started to be referred to as just the “Internet.”

On March 12th, 1989, the hypertext transfer protocol was first written. This would bring about the first website, utilizing three new resources: HTML, HTTP, and a program called Web Browser. 

The Internet, which came to be known also by the name of the World Wide Web proliferated: in 1993, there were only 100 World Wide Web Sites, and by 1997 there were already over 200,000.