The Internet and World Wide Web

The Internet was practically unheard of fifty years ago. In the early late fifties and early sixties, research on the subject was fueled by the launch of the SPUTNIK in the USSR. A few researchers, scientists, and military personnel in the United States felt that sharing information electronically would assist collaboration and aid scientific and military advancement. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was started to further this end and to make the US a world leader in science and technology. Specifically, the Department of Defense was interested in a decentralized military research network that would serve a crucial function if the US was subjected to a nuclear attack.

A man called Paul Baran who worked for a defense agency was commissioned to conduct research on the subject. He suggested Packet Switching as a way of transferring information. Data would be broken down into packets or datagrams that contained labels indicating their origin and destination and. These packets would be forwarded from one networked computer to another until they reached their destination. ARPANET, a network that used packet switching technology, became a reality in 1968-69. The switches were built on a Honeywell minicomputer and a single physical network linked The University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford University, The University of California at Santa Barbara, and The University of Utah via 50Kbps circuits. This network used NCP or network control protocol. NCP only allowed communication between computers on the same physical network. After this first step, a few events that took place in the early to mid 1970s influenced the growth of the ARPANET in leaps and bounds:

• The invention of TCP/IP - Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol - allowed communication between computers on different networks
• The invention of e-mail in 1972 - E-mail personalized communication; you talked with and passed information on to a person.
• The invention of ethernet, a technology that allowed data to be relayed extremely fast between coaxial cables
• The conception of SATNET, a satellite network that connected the US with Europe.

Following these developments, ARPANET started using TCP/IP and began to include radio and satellite connections. The term Internet was coined in 1972. The net grew from the four originally connected institutions to around a hundred. Other key developments during the 1970s included the birth of UUCP or UNIX-to-UNIX copy, a file transfer mechanism that allowed a user to copy a file from one computer to another through phone lines. UUCP was the protocol utilized by the USENET - a decentralized news group network that grew to vast proportions later on. USENET was started by college students who did not have the resources to connect to ARPANET. A vast number of newsgroups were formed on USENET and topical information was shared through these newsgroups.

Other universities started their own networks, one of the most prominent of these is the BITNET or 'Because Its Time Network' that utilized IBM's store and forward network protocol. In store-and-forward switching, the message (which may be split) traverses through each linked computer on a network (called a node). Either the entire message or parts of it are stored on each node and then forwarded to the next computer.

In the 1980s, another network called CSNET was started by the NSF and offered to institutions that were not part of ARPANET. CSNET and ARPANET were later connected. The net, that had run on a single 'backbone', or network, up to this point, had both the CSNET and ARPANET backbones now. Also, easy to remember names for each computer on the network were substituted for strings of numbers following the implementation of DNS or Domain Name Service technology. An upgrade to a much faster T1 line circuit equipped with special routers took place. This new 1.544Mbps T1 network was called NSFNET; the old 56 Kbps ARPANET and CSNET remained. Traffic increased so quickly after the T1 line was installed that network upgrade plans were made right away. Over the eighties, the number of organizations that had an address on the net and were connected through the Internet ('HOSTS') grew to over 50,000.

In the early 1990s, NSFNET was ungraded to 45Mbps T3 lines. ARPANET and CSNET were disbanded. A hypertext system similar to modern HTML was implemented in Geneva to help physics researchers efficiently share information. The World Wide Web was released in 1992 and several private backbones of varying speed were connected to the NSFNET backbone. Over a million hosts were connected by this time. The first Internet browser - a Graphical User Interface(GUI) to the World Wide Web(WWW) - 'Mosaic', was developed. The number of hosts grew exponentially, as did the number of private networks connected to the main NSFNET backbone. An ATM (Asynchronous Transmission Mode) backbone with a speed of 145Mbps was installed on NSFNET. In 1995, with over six and a half million hosts online, NSF stopped allowing direct access to its backbone. A few companies were authorized to provide access and sell connections to the backbone. Hosts had to pay an annual fee to keep the name of their main web sites ( domains). Domains that ended with .gov and .edu - government agencies and educational institutions in the US - were exempt. The vast mesh of connected backbones became known as the Internet. Independent 'Internet Service Providers' now carried a large proportion of Internet traffic and almost twenty million hosts were online by 1997. In general, the Internet has grown along with integral Network and Computing technologies. Today , almost five hundred million hosts from remote corners of the world are online.

Following the above brief study of Internet history, an overview of computer networks, the TCP/IP technology, and other Internet related terms will provide a good foundation to all that we will learn about Web Development later on.