Internet picture

The History of The Internet

By Freya Thomas

  • Packet-switching Was Created

    Packet-switching Was Created
    In 1969, Lawrence Roberts and Leonard Kleinrock invented packets to help computers to communicate with each other. Packet switching is a method of splitting the data you are sending. A computer file is broken up into thousands of small segments called "packets." Each packet contains up to around 1500 bytes and is distributed across a network before arriving as a single file at the destination.

  • The Beginning Of ARPANET

    The Beginning Of ARPANET
    In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and brought together some of the best scientific minds in the country. Its main goal was to help the American military technology to stay ahead of its opponents. After the packet-switching was first developed, Kleinrock used it to transfer messages to another site, and so the ARPA Network—or ARPANET—was discovered.

  • The Email

    The Email
    In 1971 the rapid growth of ARPANET resulted in the development of the email. Users rapidly saw the network's potential as a tool for delivering messages between different ARPANET machines as the network grew in popularity. Early email uses sent personal messages however, as the network evolved it had become a place to connect, talk, and make friends.

  • The Introduction Of TCP

    The Introduction Of TCP
    As ARPANET grew, a set of rules for dealing with data packets needed to be set up. TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol and was invented by two American computer scientists, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, in 1974, this allowed computers to speak the same language. ARPANET quickly become a global interconnected network of networks, or the ‘Internet,' after the introduction of TCP.

  • The Introduction Of IP

    The Introduction Of IP
    IP stands for Internet Protocol and the term refers to a set of protocols that govern how data moves through a network. TCP and IP are interrelated. Every device connected to the internet is given a unique IP number, known as an IP address. The number can be used to locate any internet-connected device in the world.

  • DNS

    DNS
    DNS stands for Domain Name System and it converts complicated IP addresses into simple names. The DNS is structured into domains to make it easier to send emails. In the early 1980s, there was a rapid development of local area networks (LANs), Due to the increase of computers, it became difficult to keep track of all the IP addresses. Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel at the University of Southern California invented the DNS and it was one of the innovations that helped create the World Wide Web.

  • The End Of ARPANET And The Beginning Of NSFNET

    The End Of ARPANET And The Beginning Of NSFNET
    By the mid 70s ARPANET wasn't the only network around and by the 80s other networks began using TCP/IP as well. Soon after, all the networks came together to form the internet with ARPANET holding it together. in 1990, after the establishment of the internet, ARPANET was decommissioned and replaced by NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network) as the backbone of the internet. The reason for this is that ARPANET needed major upgrades to handle all the new traffic from the other networks.

  • HTTP And The URI

    HTTP And The URI
    Berners-Lee invented HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and designed the URI (Universal Resource Identifier) system, more commonly know as URL, in 1990. HTTP is the language that computers speak and URI provides a unique address to where the documents can easily be found.

  • The Introduction Of Web Browsers

    The Introduction Of Web Browsers
    Tim Berners-Lee was the first person to develop software that could display HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) documents in a readable format. He called the ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’. In 1988, Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of a ‘web of information.' He used hyperlinks to connect documents as they can point to any other HTML page or file that sits on top of the internet.

  • GeoCities

    GeoCities
    GeoCities first came online in 1994 it was a way for anyone to create a website and share their backgrounds and interests. Anyone who created an account for GeoCities was both a user and creator. GeoCities was the 3rd most popular site on the web by 1999 behind AOL and Yahoo. Yahoo later bought GeoCities for 3.6 billion dollars in 1999 until it fell on hard times after the .com bubble was created.

  • The Dotcom Bubble

    The Dotcom Bubble
    The Dotcom bubble came around between the years1998 and 2000. The internet was thought to be central to economic growth at the time, which led to a frenzy of investment and unrealistic expectations about return rates. Many companies went online afterwards and some like the $200 million high-fashion online retailer Boo.com, went bankrupt just six months after its website went live. However, this failure helped lay the foundation for future success in eCommerce

  • The Switch From Dial-up To Broadband

    The Switch From Dial-up To Broadband
    In 2005, people started to change from Dial-up to broadband. This is because, depending on the broadband it could be 10s, 100s or 1000s of times faster than Dial-up.