Casting a Wide Net: The History and Evolution of the Internet

The growth of the Internet remains the sole signifier of modern times and has given way to search engines, social media, mobile apps, online games, and countless other functions. In North America alone, about 78.6 percent of the population uses the Internet. Google sees an average 3,278,688,524 searches in a single day, and users send about 144 billion emails a day. The Internet was also adopted much faster than any other medium. Radio took 38 years to reach a regular audience of 50 million. Television took 13 years. The Internet took just four years. Its hard to imagine a world without the Internet, but the Internet as we know it is surprisingly younger than you might think. Lets take a look at the Internets humble beginnings and its evolution into the massive network it is today.

Exploring Theories and Possibilities

Before the Internet even saw its first cables, it was but a glimmer in the eye of Dr. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at the Pentagon. In 1962, according to a series of memos, Dr. Licklider came up with the idea of an Intergalactic Computer Network. At the time, computers were seen as mathematical devicesessentially, enormous calculators. Lickliders concept saw computers as more of a communicative tool that would allow users to connect to the Intergalactic Network to access other computers and users. While the name didnt stick, the ideas he came up withecommerce, online banking, cloud storage, digital librarieswere surprisingly prescient. As great as Lickliders ideas were, no one was sure how to actually carry out that kind of
Dr. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider

information exchange. Enter Leonard Kleinrock, an engineer and computer scientist at MIT. In 1961, Kleinrock wrote a paper on the mathematical theory of packet switching networks. In 1964, he literally wrote the book on packet networks. Packet switching involves breaking up data into a series of packets. These packets are sent individually across the network and then reassembled in the right order by the destination computer. Packet switching is how the modern Internet works. It is different from circuit switching, in which a network establishes a temporary connection until the end of each transmission. A phone call works on a circuit switch. In 1965, Thomas Merrill and Lawrence G. Roberts, convinced by Kleinrocks research, used a low-speed dial-up phone line to create the first interstate network connection between one computer in Massachusetts and one in California.

ARPANet
The biggest step in creating a functioning computer network came in the form of ARPANet, seen as one of the earliest forebears of the present Internet. In 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a military branch, worked on a network of computers that could exchange information freely while being geographically separated. While some say ARPANet came about as a means of protecting sensitive information for the military, those working within ARPA have said that the early network was a solution for the limited number of capable research computers in the country and the fact that many researchers didnt have access to those computers. Granted, most computers back in the day were massive, roomsized devices. A technique called timesharing allowed multiple people to access one computer at the same time. While networks existed back in the day, they required direct

Professor Leonard Kleinrock in front of the first Interface Message Processor.

connections that were limited in scope and size. Regardless of intent and equipment, ARPANet was surprisingly successful, connecting just four computers in its initial incarnation, each located in UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford, and the University of Utah. These four were connected via phone lines and interface message processors (IMPs), which are equivalent to the routers of today. The addition of more computers to the network caused compatibility issues, which necessitated a standard network protocol for all computers. Thats where TCP (transmission control protocol) and IP (Internet protocol) came into play. A computer sends a network message by breaking the data into IP packets, which you can think of as individual pages of a book. The TCP makes sure each of those pages make it to their destination and get put back in proper order. Although ARPANet didnt have social media or even Google, it did make some exclusive contributions to our current Internet, including: Email: Programmer Ray Tomlinson developed an electronic mail system for ARPANet in 1972. This system modified READMAIL and SNDMSG, two applications on the Tenex OS. Tomlinson also takes the credit for using the @ symbol to join a persons name with their host computer. This was eventually extended to the use of mailing lists. File transfers: Through ARPANet, you could send, access, copy, and save any data from other computers on the network. By 1970, ARPA could essentially upload an upgrade to one computer to upgrade all the other computers in the system, much like how Windows updates work today. Remote login: One of the best parts of ARPANet, remote logins allowed you to use a computer to log into another computer hundreds of miles away. Researchers could reach information without needing to physically travel across the country.

The Spread
By the mid-1970s, the idea of a network of computers spread to a variety of larger organizations. The U.S. Department of Energy established MFENet for its magnetic fusion energy researchers and HEPNet for its high energy physicists. NASA developed SPAN for its space physicists. Rick Adrion, David Farber, and Larry Landweber established CSNET for the community of academic computer scientists. USENET used built-in communication protocols in UNIX systems, and BITNET connected academic mainframe computers. As pervasive as these networks were, they were all quite limited in their reach and were designed for closed communities of scientists, researchers, and academicsnot the general

public. Considering that focused intent, there wasnt much pressure for a protocol that was compatible with all individual networks.

Putting the Internet Together

As ideas and technologies grew, the possibility of connecting the entire world to a single network of networks grew. First, the protocol problem. With so many different network protocols, individual computers had trouble communicating with each other. Robert Kahn of ARPANet and Vinton Cerf, a computer scientist at Stanford, got around this issue by using an internetwork protocol that essentially comprised the greater adoption of TCP/IP, which allowed communications among Ethernet networks, analog lines, phone lines, satellite, packet radios, and more. The word Internet was coined in 1974 as a shortened form of internetwork, but throughout the 70s and 80s, it was used as an adjective. It wasnt until the 90s that people began to use Internet as the proper noun it is today. Then came NSFNET, a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation in 1985. This initially began with a series of supercomputer centers but grew to envelop regional networks, organizations, and several research and education institutes. The NSFNET backbone, built in 1986, was a 56-kbps physical network that supported the greater network effort. This backbone was available to regional networks and supercomputer centers. These regional networks extended availability to other computers, creating a network of networks that would lay the foundation for the Internet as a whole.

The World Wide Web

While people refer to the Internet and the World Wide Web interchangeably, they are actually two separate entities. The World Wide Web, which was proposed by Tim BernersLee in 1989, consists of a series of technologies that allowed users to effectively navigate various pages on the Internet. You can think of the Web as a program running on the Internet. Berners-Lees proposal of the World Wide Web also introduced several technologies that are practically ubiquitous today, including: HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol allows you to reach linked resources throughout the Web. Its what starts every single web page in existence. URI: A Uniform Resource Identifier is the address of each page, image, or resource on the Web.

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language is what you use to create pages and format texts and links.

Berners-Lee also created WorldWideWeb, the first page editor and browser, and httpd, the first server. In 1990, he finished the code he had personally written, creating the World Wide Web. In 1991, all of these tools came together to create the first web page. To wit, the first web page to ever exist on the Internet simply explained the World Wide Web. In order to spread the technologies of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994. This group acted to create guidelines, standards, and specifications that would ensure the Webs proper function for users as well as its proper evolution.

The Internet Today

That first web page eventually gave way to the social media, video hosting, and news outlet sites we know and use today. Things like email and cloud computing, which were novelties in the days of ARPANet, have become necessary to communicating and conducting business. As of 2013, about 47 percent of the worlds population regularly uses the Internet. In 2012, e-commerce saw $225.5 billion in sales. Its amazing to see how far the Internet has comefrom some basic ideas to closed networks to the massive bank of information, culture, entertainment, and social interaction that it is today. The Internet remains an incredibly adaptable structure that is designed to evolve with its users and the new technologies available. Considering how fast the Internet has grown and what weve developed in such a short amount of time, the future of the Internet promises some great developments.

Images: Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider from Wikimedia Commons; U.S. National Library of Medicines "Once and Future Web" online exhibition under the NLM Copyright Information page. Leonard Kleinrock and IMP1 from Wikimedia Commons; Leonard Kleinrock's web site http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/personal_history.html

Resources: http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/briefhistory-internet http://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/jcr-licklider

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