Definition of the internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (called TCP or IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail.
History
The history of the Internet starts in the 1950s and 1960s with the development of computers. This began with point-to-point communication between mainframe computers and terminals, and then expanded to point-to-point connections between computers. Then there was the early research on packet switching (Packet switching is a digital networking communications method that groups all transmitted data – doesn’t matter what kind of content, type, or structure – into suitably sized blocks, called packets.) Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I at NPL in the UK, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks.
In 1982 the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) developed the Computer Science Network (CSNET) and again in 1986 when NSFNET provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
It started in October 1962, when J. C. R. Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina as Director of the newly established Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) with a mandate to interconnect the United States Department of Defense's main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and SAC HQ. There he formed an informal group within DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to further computer research. He began by writing memos describing a distributed network to the IPTO staff, which he called "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network". As part of the information processing office's role, three network terminals had been installed: one for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley and one for the Compatible Time-Sharing System project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Licklider left the IPTO in 1964 five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his vision of universal networking that started the ideas that lead to the further development of the ARPANET.
The biggest problem was the issue of connecting separate physical networks to form one logical network. During the 1960s Donald Davies (National Physical Laboratory, UK), proposed and developed a similar network based on what he called packet-switching, the term everybody used after wards. Leonard Kleinrock (MIT) developed mathematical theory behind this technology. Packet-switching provides better bandwidth and response times than the traditional circuit-switching technology used for telephony.
ARPANET
The first ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969. It was made by Robert Taylor and Larry Roberts after Licklider’s first idea.
By December 5, 1969, a 4-node network was connected by adding the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Building on ideas developed in ALOHAnet, the ARPANET grew rapidly. By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added about every twenty days.
ARPANET became the technical start of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used.
IPSS
In 1978 The British Post Office, Western Union International and Tymnet worked together to create the first international packet switched network, referred to as the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS). This network grew from Europe and the US to cover Canada, Hong Kong and Australia by 1981. By the 1990s it provided a worldwide networking infrastructure.
The Internet
With so many different network methods (like ARPANET, Mark I at NPL in the UK, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet), something was needed to unify them. Robert E. Kahn of DARPA and ARPANET recruited Vinton Cerf of Stanford University to work with him on the problem. By 1973, they had soon worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the ARPANET, the hosts became responsible.
The specification of the resulting protocol, RFC 675 – Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, Network Working Group, December 1974, contains the first attested use of the term internet, as a shorthand for internetworking; later RFCs repeat this use, so the word started out as an adjective rather than the noun it is today.
With the role of the network reduced to the bare minimum, it became possible to join almost any networks together, no matter what their characteristics were, thereby solving Kahn's initial problem. DARPA agreed to fund development of prototype software, and after several years of work, the first somewhat crude demonstration of a gateway between the Packet Radio network in the SF Bay area and the ARPANET was conducted. On November 22, 1977[25] a three network demonstration was conducted including the ARPANET, the Packet Radio Network and the Atlantic Packet Satellite network—all sponsored by DARPA. Stemming from the first specifications of TCP in 1974, TCP/IP emerged in mid-late 1978 in nearly final form. DARPA sponsored or encouraged the development of TCP/IP implementations for many operating systems and then scheduled a migration of all hosts on all of its packet networks to TCP/IP. On January 1, 1983, known as flag day, TCP/IP protocols became the only approved protocol on the ARPANET, replacing the earlier NCP protocol.
The internet expands
The networks based on the ARPANET were government funded and therefore restricted to noncommercial uses such as research; unrelated commercial use was strictly forbidden. This initially restricted connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were.
As interest in widespread networking grew and new applications for it were developed, the Internet's technologies spread throughout the rest of the world. The network-agnostic approach in TCP/IP meant that it was easy to use any existing network infrastructure, such as the IPSS network, to carry Internet traffic. In 1984, University College London replaced its transatlantic satellite links with TCP/IP over IPSS.
Many sites unable to link directly to the Internet started to create simple gateways to allow transfer of e-mail, at that time the most important application.
Finally, the Internet's remaining centralized routing aspects were removed. The EGP routing protocol was replaced by a new protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This turned the Internet into a meshed topology and moved away from the centric architecture which ARPANET had emphasized. In 1994, Classless Inter-Domain Routing was introduced to support better conservation of address space which allowed use of route aggregation to decrease the size of routing tables.
TCP/IP goes global
In 1988 Daniel Karrenberg, from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, visited Ben Segal, and they made so that Europe used TCP/IP connections too. At the same time Australian universities got a limited connection to the global networks also. The Internet began to expand to Asia in the late 1980s.
At the beginning of the 1990s, African countries started using IPSS and 2400 baud modem UUCP links for international and internetwork computer communications.
WWW
As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realized the increasing need to be able to find and organize files and information. Projects such as Gopher, WAIS, and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to organize distributed data. Unfortunately, these projects fail, and didn’t work out correctly.
In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web – the WWW.
Search machine
Even before the World Wide Web, there were search engines that attempted to organize the Internet. The first of these was the Archie search engine from McGill University in 1990, followed in 1991 by WAIS and Gopher. All three of those systems predated the invention of the World Wide Web but all continued to index the Web and the rest of the Internet for several years after the Web appeared. There are still Gopher servers as of 2006, although there are a great many more web servers.
As the Web grew, search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the Web and allow people to find things. The first full-text Web search engine was WebCrawler in 1994. Before WebCrawler, only Web page titles were searched. Another early search engine, Lycos, was created in 1993 as a university project, and was the first to achieve commercial success. During the late 1990s, both Web directories and Web search engines were popular—Yahoo! (founded 1994) and Altavista (founded 1995) were the respective industry leaders. By August 2001, the directory model had begun to give way to search engines, tracking the rise of Google (founded 1998). On June 3, 2009, Microsoft launched its new search engine, Bing.
Mobile phones and the Internet
The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, launched in Finland in 1996. The viability of Internet services access on mobile phones was limited until prices came down from that model and network providers started to develop systems and services conveniently accessible on phones. NTT DoCoMo in Japan launched the first mobile Internet service, i-mode, in 1999 and this is considered the birth of the mobile phone Internet services. In 2001 the mobile phone email system by Research in Motion for their BlackBerry product was launched in America.
Danish statistics
In 1996 used 12% of the Danes the internet in average two hours a week. 88% didn’t have it. Then in July 2007 83% had access to the internet from the home, then in 2010, a study showed that this no. now was 91%, so it went fast.
Where will it go?
In 2010 we developed that you could use the internet from space, when the first live Internet link was sent from an astronaut T. J. Creamer, when he posted an update on twitter. So it´s unbelievable what we can do today, what will it end with?
