When was the internet first created

Their aim was to help American military technology stay ahead of its enemies and prevent surprises, such as the launch of the satellite Sputnik 1, happening again. Roberts was the first person to connect two computers. By , 30 academic, military and research institutions had joined the network, connecting locations including Hawaii, Norway and the UK. The term is used to describe a set of protocols that govern how data moves through a network.

After the creation of ARPANET, more networks of computers began to join the network, and the need arose for an agreed set of rules for handling data.

The address on the datagram can be read by any computer, but only the final host machine can open the envelope and read the message inside. Kahn and Cerf called this method transmission-control protocol TCP.

Every device connected to the internet is given a unique IP number. Known as an IP address, the number can be used to find the location of any internet-connected device in the world. In the early s, cheaper technology and the appearance of desktop computers allowed the rapid development of local area networks LANs.

An increase in the amount of computers on the network made it difficult to keep track of all the different IP addresses. It was one of the innovations that paved the way for the World Wide Web. As the network increased in popularity and scope, users quickly realised the potential of the network as a tool for sending messages between different ARPANET computers. Ray Tomlinson , an American computer programmer, is responsible for electronic mail as we know it today.

When DNS was introduced, this was extended to user host. Early email users sent personal messages and began mailing lists on specific topics. The development of email showed how the network had transformed. Rather than a way of accessing expensive computing power, it had started to become a place to communicate, gossip and make friends. From the s onwards, the home computer industry grew exponentially. Computers were embedded with the rhetoric of the future and learning, but in most cases this meant learning to program so that people could actually make the technology do something, such as play games.

Between and , the network grew from 2, hosts to 30, People were now using the internet to send messages to each other, read news and swap files. However, advanced knowledge of computing was still needed to dial in to the system and use it effectively, and there was still no agreement on the way that documents on the network were formatted.

The internet needed to be easier to use. Its history is complex and involves many aspects — technological, organizational, and community. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use of online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community operations.

The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site.

In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept. Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July and the first book on the subject in Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major step along the path towards computer networking.

The other key step was to make the computers talk together. The result of this experiment was the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate for the job.

The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in These last two nodes incorporated application visualization projects, with Glen Culler and Burton Fried at UCSB investigating methods for display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over the net, and Robert Taylor and Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating methods of 3-D representations over the net.

Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the networking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on how to utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day. Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software. This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public.

In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design, beginning with the ARPANET as the pioneering packet switching network, but soon to include packet satellite networks, ground-based packet radio networks and other networks.

The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. Up until that time there was only one general method for federating networks. This was the traditional circuit switching method where networks would interconnect at the circuit level, passing individual bits on a synchronous basis along a portion of an end-to-end circuit between a pair of end locations. Recall that Kleinrock had shown in that packet switching was a more efficient switching method.

Along with packet switching, special purpose interconnection arrangements between networks were another possibility. While there were other limited ways to interconnect different networks, they required that one be used as a component of the other, rather than acting as a peer of the other in offering end-to-end service.

Each network can be designed in accordance with the specific environment and user requirements of that network. There are generally no constraints on the types of network that can be included or on their geographic scope, although certain pragmatic considerations will dictate what makes sense to offer.

This work was originally part of the packet radio program, but subsequently became a separate program in its own right. Key to making the packet radio system work was a reliable end-end protocol that could maintain effective communication in the face of jamming and other radio interference, or withstand intermittent blackout such as caused by being in a tunnel or blocked by the local terrain.

Kahn first contemplated developing a protocol local only to the packet radio network, since that would avoid having to deal with the multitude of different operating systems, and continuing to use NCP.

If any packets were lost, the protocol and presumably any applications it supported would come to a grinding halt. In this model NCP had no end-end host error control, since the ARPANET was to be the only network in existence and it would be so reliable that no error control would be required on the part of the hosts. Thus, Kahn decided to develop a new version of the protocol which could meet the needs of an open-architecture network environment.

While NCP tended to act like a device driver, the new protocol would be more like a communications protocol. At this point he realized it would be necessary to learn the implementation details of each operating system to have a chance to embed any new protocols in an efficient way. Thus, in the spring of , after starting the internetting effort, he asked Vint Cerf then at Stanford to work with him on the detailed design of the protocol.

Cerf had been intimately involved in the original NCP design and development and already had the knowledge about interfacing to existing operating systems. Subsequently a refined version was published in 7. Kahn had intended that the TCP protocol support a range of transport services, from the totally reliable sequenced delivery of data virtual circuit model to a datagram service in which the application made direct use of the underlying network service, which might imply occasional lost, corrupted or reordered packets.

However, the initial effort to implement TCP resulted in a version that only allowed for virtual circuits. This model worked fine for file transfer and remote login applications, but some of the early work on advanced network applications, in particular packet voice in the s, made clear that in some cases packet losses should not be corrected by TCP, but should be left to the application to deal with.

This led to a reorganization of the original TCP into two protocols, the simple IP which provided only for addressing and forwarding of individual packets, and the separate TCP, which was concerned with service features such as flow control and recovery from lost packets.

Connecting the two together was far more economical that duplicating these very expensive computers. However, while file transfer and remote login Telnet were very important applications, electronic mail has probably had the most significant impact of the innovations from that era. Email provided a new model of how people could communicate with each other, and changed the nature of collaboration, first in the building of the Internet itself as is discussed below and later for much of society.

A key concept of the Internet is that it was not designed for just one application, but as a general infrastructure on which new applications could be conceived, as illustrated later by the emergence of the World Wide Web. The Stanford team, led by Cerf, produced the detailed specification and within about a year there were three independent implementations of TCP that could interoperate.

This was the beginning of long term experimentation and development to evolve and mature the Internet concepts and technology. Beginning with the first three networks ARPANET, Packet Radio, and Packet Satellite and their initial research communities, the experimental environment has grown to incorporate essentially every form of network and a very broad-based research and development community.

When desktop computers first appeared, it was thought by some that TCP was too big and complex to run on a personal computer. That implementation was fully interoperable with other TCPs, but was tailored to the application suite and performance objectives of the personal computer, and showed that workstations, as well as large time-sharing systems, could be a part of the Internet.

It included an emphasis on the complexity of protocols and the pitfalls they often introduce. This book was influential in spreading the lore of packet switching networks to a very wide community.

This change from having a few networks with a modest number of time-shared hosts the original ARPANET model to having many networks has resulted in a number of new concepts and changes to the underlying technology.

First, it resulted in the definition of three network classes A, B, and C to accommodate the range of networks. Class A represented large national scale networks small number of networks with large numbers of hosts ; Class B represented regional scale networks; and Class C represented local area networks large number of networks with relatively few hosts.

A major shift occurred as a result of the increase in scale of the Internet and its associated management issues. To make it easy for people to use the network, hosts were assigned names, so that it was not necessary to remember the numeric addresses.

As you might expect for a technology so expansive and ever-changing, it is impossible to credit the invention of the internet to a single person. Long before the technology existed to actually build the internet, many scientists had already anticipated the existence of worldwide networks of information.

Originally funded by the U. The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one was the size of a small house. In response to this, other networks were created to provide information sharing. January 1, is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. This allowed different kinds of computers on different networks to "talk" to each other.