History of Internet

Media in the Online Age

History of the internet

Difference between internet and world wide web.

• The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet.

• Whereas, The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet.

Brief History

• The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. 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. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.

• The original ARPANET grew into the Internet. 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. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level "Internetworking Architecture".

• 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. Originally, there were a fairly limited number of hosts, so it was feasible to maintain a single table of all the hosts and their associated names and addresses. The shift to having a large number of independently managed networks (e.g., LANs) meant that having a single table of hosts was no longer feasible, and the Domain Name System (DNS) was invented by Paul Mockapetris of USC/ISI. The DNS permitted a scalable distributed mechanism for resolving hierarchical host names into an Internet address.

Related Questions.

Q. When the Internet started and by whom/what ?

• The initial idea is credited as being Leonard Kleinrock's after he published his first paper entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" on May 31, 1961.

• In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider became the first Director of IPTO and gave his vision of a galactic network. In addition to ideas from Licklider and Kleinrock, Robert Taylor helped create the idea of the network that later became ARPANET.

Q. Who created Emailing ?

• In 1978, a 14-year-old named VA Shiva Ayyadurai developed a computer program, which replicated the features of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system. He named his program “EMAIL”. Shiva filed an application for copyright in his program and in 1982 the United States Copyright Office issued a Certificate of Registration to him on the progress.

Q. When was spam born ?

• On May 3, 1978, the Internet witnessed a glorious and not particularly welcome birth: The first ever spam email. Gary Thuerk, a marketer for the Digital Equipment Corporation, blasted out his message to 400 of the 2600 people on Arpanet, the DARPA-funded so-called “first Internet.” Naturally: He was selling something. (Computers, or more specifically, information about open houses where people could check out the computers.) He annoyed a lot of people. And he also had some success, with a few recipients interested in what he was pushing. And thus, spam was born.

Q. What is MUD and USE NET ?

• MUD or Multi User Dungeons is a class of virtual reality experiments accessible via the Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple 'locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability for characters to build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world.

• Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It was developed from the general purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980.

Q. What happened in 1988?

• 1988 was an important year in the early history of the Internet—it was the year of the first well-known computer virus, the 1988 Internet worm. The first officially sanctioned online commercial e-mail provider debuted as well. A computer virus is a malware program that, when executed, replicates by inserting copies of itself into other computer programs, data files, or the boot sector of the hard drive; when this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be "infected".

Q. What was launched in 1989 ?

• Galileo was an unmanned NASA spacecraft which studied the planet Jupiter and its moons, as well as several other solar system bodies. Named after the astronomer Galileo Galilei, it consisted of an orbiter and entry probe. It was launched on October 18, 1989, carried by Space Shuttle Atlantis, on the STS-34 mission. Galileo arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, after gravitational assist flybys of Venus and Earth, and became the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter. It launched the first probe into Jupiter, directly measuring its atmosphere.

Q. When was the first webpage created ?

• Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, born 8 June 1955, also known as "TimBL", is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)client and server via the Internet sometime around mid November of that same year.

Q. Why was 1995 significant for internet users ?

There are a lot of things that happened in 1995.

• Netscape introduced JavaScript.

• Netscape Navigator completely dominated the web browser market.

• Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 1.

• Microsoft released Windows 95. Most people were using Win 3.1 or 3.11 at the time.

• Sun announced Java.

• Intel released their 133 MHz Pentium processor, and the Pentium Pro processor (running up to a mighty 200 MHz).

• Sony launched the first Playstation.

• Linus Torvalds released version 1.2.0 of the Linux kernel (a.k.a. Linux 95).

• And sadly enough: The final original strip of Calvin & Hobbes was published.

Q. When did Google go live ?

• Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford University.

• In search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got") and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page.

Q. When was Wikipedia launched ?

• The Wikipedia was launched on Monday 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger; however, its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this. The earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, but the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.