The History of the Internet

Over time, the Internet turned into what it is today, but it had humble beginnings as a government-sanctioned network. The original purpose of the Internet was to provide a non-local way for scientists, military and government entities to communicate in the event of a nuclear strike. Most ideas for the internet developed around the same time, and its evolution came with the help of many people of vision.

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider envisioned a global computer network whose components could communicate with each other. He became a developer at DARPA and began overseeing that project. From then on, there were many contributors to the development of the modern day Internet. MIT's Leonard Kleinrock was the creator of packet switching, the way data moves within the Internet. Others from MIT, such as Lawrence Roberts, were instrumental in the evolution of the network. In 1965, Roberts connected a computer in Massachusetts to one in California using dial-up; the inadequate circuitry provided by the phone company demonstrated a need for more advanced technology.

In 1966, Roberts joined DARPA to help develop its packet switching network. DARPA then got a new name, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET. The latter is synonymous with the development of the internet; again, there were multiple people contributing to the project. ARPANET consisted of four computers, and it went online December 5, 1969. TCP/IP was implemented on January 1, 1983. TCP/IP allowed local area networks to connect to wide area networks, which is a necessity today.

There were numerous other developments that involved different protocols, ones that ran within the Internet. Email, NNTP (network news transfer protocol), Telnet, and FTP were in use then, and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was used by 1988. The nascent Internet was not very user-friendly; that changed when Tim Berners-Lee suggested the use of hypertext language. That change paved the way for Delphi to become the first nationwide ISP in November 1992.

In October 1994, Internet users were introduced to Netscape 0.9, the first successful web browser. The browser was invented by Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen, and it gradually evolved into the Netscape Navigator. Not to be outdone, Microsoft released IE 1.0; Netscape was more popular until Microsoft began bundling IE into its Windows OS.

In 1995, the NSF (National Science Foundation) ended their sponsorship of the project. There were then multiple ISPs such as AOL, CompuServ, and Prodigy offering Internet service, and there was software available that allowed anyone to set their computer up to access the Internet. As they say, the rest of the story is history.