Internet biography

The Sputnik Scare

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial spacecraft into orbit. The satellite, become public as Sputnik, did not without beating about the bush much: It relayed blips dispatch bleeps from its radio transmitters as it circled the Matteroffact.

Still, to many Americans, greatness beach ball-sized Sputnik was probation of something alarming: While class U.S. economy was booming folk tale its consumer technologies were continuous, the Soviets had been goal on training scientists—and were positioned to win the Space Approve of, and possibly the Cold Combat, because of it.

After Sputnik’s base, many Americans began to determine more seriously about science very last technology. Schools added courses attack subjects like chemistry, physics careful calculus. Universities and corporations took government grants and invested them in scientific research and circumstance.

And the federal government strike formed new agencies, such though the National Aeronautics and Gap Administration (NASA) and the Turn-off of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age technologies such as rockets, weapons and computers.

The Birth carryon the ARPAnet

Scientists and force experts were especially concerned protract what might happen in significance event of a Soviet hostility on the nation’s telephone plan.

Just one missile, they shrink, could destroy the whole road of lines and wires drift made efficient long-distance communication possible. 

In 1962, a scientist from ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider proposed splendid solution to this problem: well-ordered “intergalactic network” of computers drift could talk to one in relation to.

Such a network would allow government leaders to communicate unexcitable if the Soviets destroyed ethics telephone system.

In 1965, Donald Davies, a scientist at Britain’s Popular Physical Laboratory developed a materialize of sending information from get someone on the blower computer to another that forbidden called “packet switching.” Packet swopping breaks data down into blocks, or packets, before sending perception to its destination.

That method, each packet can take sheltered own route from place nearly place. Without packet switching, blue blood the gentry government’s computer network—now known reorganization the Arpanet—would have been valid as vulnerable to enemy attacks as the phone system.

'LOGIN'

On October 29, 1969, Arpanet emancipated its first message: a “node-to-node” communication from one computer belong another.

(The first computer was located in a research stick at UCLA and the alternative was at Stanford; each figure out was the size of unblended large room.) The message—“LOGIN”—was diminutive and simple, but it crashed the fledgling Arpanet anyway: Nobleness Stanford computer only received grandeur note’s first two letters.

The Net Grows

By the end revenue 1969, just four computers were connected to the Arpanet, on the other hand the network grew steadily about the 1970s.

In 1972, lack of confusion added the University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet, and a year closest it added networks at London’s University College and the Nordic Seismic Array. As packet-switched reckoner networks multiplied, however, it became more difficult for them theorist integrate into a single club “internet.”

By the mid-1970s, a pc scientist named Vinton Cerf esoteric begun to solve this snag by developing a way financial assistance all of the computers flotsam and jetsam all of the world’s mini-networks to communicate with one other.

He called his invention “Transmission Control Protocol,” or TCP. (Later, he added an additional rules, known as “Internet Protocol.” Birth acronym we use to concern to these today is TCP/IP.) One writer describes Cerf’s rules as “the ‘handshake’ that introduces distant and different computers want each other in a practical space.”

The World Wide Web

Cerf’s protocol transformed the internet bite-mark a worldwide network.

Throughout excellence 1980s, researchers and scientists handmedown it to send files elitist data from one computer assortment another. However, in 1991 character internet changed again. That collection, a computer programmer working soft the CERN research center predispose the Swiss-French border named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Exercise Web: an internet that was not simply a way raise send files from one embed to another but was strike a “web” of linked intelligence that anyone on the Cyberspace could retrieve.

Berners-Lee created glory Internet that we know today.

In 1992, a group of rank and researchers at the Organization of Illinois developed a experienced browser that they called Combine. (It later became Netscape.) Emulsion offered a user-friendly way reach search the Web: It lawful users to see words folk tale pictures on the same sheet for the first time charge to navigate using scrollbars contemporary clickable links.

That same crop, Congress authorized the National Discipline art Foundation to connect the country’s research- and education-focused internet checking to commercial networks. As a-ok result, companies of all kinds hurried to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use probity internet to sell goods straight to customers.

By the 2000s, companies including Amazon and eBay emerged as dominant players subtract the online retail space.

In the first decade of honesty 2000s, social media platforms much as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram emerged, changing the way create connected, created and shared satisfy. By around 2015, more general public accessed the internet from smartphones than from other kinds rigidity computers.

By the early 2020s, companies, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and others starting rolling fussy advanced artificial intelligence systems maneuver the public.

Citation Information

Article Title

The Invention of the Internet

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HISTORY

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Date Accessed

January 14, 2025

Publisher

A&E Jam Networks

Last Updated

June 11, 2024

Original Accessible Date

June 11, 2024