FREE ESSAY ON HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

A Brief History Of The Internet
By default, any definitive history of the Internet must be short, since the Internet (in
one form or another) has only been in existence for less than 30 years. The first
iteration of the Internet was launched in 1971 with a public showing in early 1972. This
first network, known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork) was very
primitive by today's standards, but a milestone in computer communications. ARPANET was
based upon the design concepts of Larry Roberts (MIT) and was fleshed out at the first
ACM symposium, held in Gaithersburg, TN in 1966, although RFPs weren't sent out until mid
1968. The Department of Defense in 1969 commissioned ARPANET, and the first node was
created at the University of California in Los Angeles, running on a Honeywell DDP-516
mini-computer. The second node was established at Stanford University and launched on
October first of the same year. On November 1, 1969, the third node was located at the
University of California, Santa Barbara and the fourth was opened at the University of
Utah in December. By 1971 15 nodes were linked including BBN, CMU, CWRU, Harvard, Lincoln
Lab, MIT, NASA/Ames, RAND, SDC, SRI and UIU(C). In that same year, Larry Roberts created
the first email management program. As a side note, Ray Tomlinson is the person who
established the @ sign as a domain/host designator from his Model 33 Teletype. The first
international connection to ARPANET is established when the University College of London
is connected in 1973, and RFC-454 File Transfer Protocol was published. 1973 was also the
year that Dr. Robert Metcalf's doctoral thesis outlined the specifications for Ethernet.
The theory was tested on Xerox PARCs computers. 1974 saw the launch of TELNET public
packet data service. UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol) was developed at AT&T Bell Labs in
1976, and distributed with UNIX the following year. 1978 saw the split of TCP into TCP
and IP. In 1979 the first MUD (Multi-User Domain) was created by Dr. Richard Bartle and
Roy Trubshaw from the University of Essex, and was the foundation for multi-player games
(among other things). This event marked the gradual decline of productivity over the
Internet. In 1981 a cooperative network between CUNY (City University of New York) and
Yale was established. This network was called BITNET (Because It's There NETwork) and was
designed to provide electronic mail transfer and list serve services between the two
institutions. RFC-801 NCP/TCP Transition Plan was published that same year. It was
because of the growing interconnectivity of new networks that the phrase Internet was
coined in 1982, and the Department of Defense also declared TCP/IP to be its defacto
standard. The first name server was developed in 1983 at the University of Wisconsin,
allowing users to access systems without having to know the exact path to the server.
1983 also saw the transition from NCP to TCP/IP, and it was at this same time that
ARPANET was split into ARPANET and MILNET. 68 of the current 113 existing nodes were
assigned to MILNET. It was also in 1983 that a San Francisco programmer, Tom Jennings
wrote the first FidoNet Bulletin Board System, which was capable of allowing both email
and message passing over the Internet between networked BBSs by 1988. In 1984, the number
of hosts on the Internet broke 1000, and DNS (Domain Name Services) was introduced.
Moderated newsgroups also made their first appearance this year, although it would be
almost a year and a half before NNTP (Network New Transfer Protocol) would be introduced.
In 1985, the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) was launched out of Sausalito California,
allowing San Francisco Bay Area users free access to the Internet. The Internet had grown
so fast, and to such large proportions by this time that some control was needed to
oversee its expansion, so in 1986, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and
Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) came into existence under the IAB. 1988 Saw the
advent of IRC (Internet Relay Chat), developed by Jarkko Oikarinen, and it can be safely
assumed that the first Hot Chat took place very shortly afterwards. By 1989 the number of
Internet hosts had capped 100,000, and the first commercial Internet mail service was
created by MCI. In 1990, ARPANET was finally closed down and ceased to exist. Two other
notable events this year include the release of ARCHIE by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and
Bill Heelan at McGill, and the first remotely controlled machine to be linked to the
Internet; a toaster (controlled by SNMP). 1991 was the year what WAIS (Wide Area
Information Servers), was released by Brewster Kahle, of Thinking Machines Corporation;
Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill released Gopher from the University of Minnesota, and
most notably, World-Wide Web was released by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN. By 1992 the number
of hosts on the Internet had exceeded 1,000,000 and the first MBONE audio multicast was
made. In 1993 InternNIC was created by, the National Science Foundation (NSF). InterNIC
provided a centralized organization for domain name registration, and continues to
regulate that function today. As the great, unwashed hordes began to flood into the
Internet, it was only natural that vendors would soon follow. So in 1995, the first
Internet based shopping mall was opened on the World Wide Web. It was also in this year
that the World Wide Web edged out FTP as the most popular service on the Internet. In
1995, Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy opened up Internet access portals, and
hundreds of thousands of commercial users flooded into what had previously been the
private domain of veteran computer users. The average IQ dropped dramatically at this
point. Since 1995, some of the new and/or emerging technologies have included Server
Push, Multicasting, Streaming Media, E-Commerce, ASP and XML. Although the Internet
started out of military necessity, it is doubtful that its creators could envision its
impact, not only on the American culture or the world in general, but on the future of
the human race. The Internet will continue to grow and evolve in the years to come,
becoming an indispensable channel of communication and a catalyst for human evolution. 
Bibliography
Bibliography
Kristula, Dave. "The History of the Internet." Website Workstation. March 1997. 
Gromov, Gregory R. "The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History." Internet Valley, Inc.
1998. October 13, 2000. 
Anderberg, Anthony. "History of the Internet and Web." June 10, 2000. 
Zakon, Robert Hobbes. "Hobbes' Internet Timeline v5.1." October 1, 2000.