A journey from ARPANET to INTERNET
There was a time when people were less aware of the internet and didn’t find any standard way for communication networks to connect worldwide. Several communication mediums were invented in the past but nothing matched the invention of the internet, it’s one of the finest inventions in the history of communication. The process took a long time to reach billions and was well worth the efforts of many scientists.
Nowadays, everyone is relying on the internet, whether it’s official work or for entertainment, we need it for every necessary information. Seems like Without it life is impossible.
Let’s say you’re travelling to an outskirts area from your city where you find network connectivity is poor, you won’t be able to browse, watch videos, cricket and open your social media accounts, and you will feel like you’re stuck. Isn’t it?
Where does the idea come from?
During the cold war between the Soviet Union and North America in 1950, the US
Scientists were mainly fearful about the surprise attack of the Soviets on the country’s telephone network; it could devastate the whole network of lines and wires of long-distance communication. So Initially J.C.R. Licklider invented an “Intergalactic computer network”, which would allow government leaders to communicate with each other even if the Soviets destroy whole telephone networks.
The 1960s
In 1969 Advanced Research project Agency developed ARPANET, using a distributed form of control. The first message was delivered over ARPANET, where one computer was placed in a research lab and the other was at Stanford, both the computers were very gigantic like a small house.
A student of the University of California, Los Angeles, named Charley Kline first typed the command LOGIN but the computer crashed after entering two characters. The research team tried to sort out the problem on the same day and again typed the command successfully.
The 1970s
In 1970, an interface Message processor was created by Harvard, MIT, and BBN, which mediated between the network and each institution’s host computer. Wesley Clark at the “ARPANET Design Session” gave the idea for the Interface Message Processor (IMP) at the IPTO Principal Investigator meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1971, Michael H. Hart introduced Project Gutenberg, which helped people to find out various electronic formats and eBooks from the library which now consists of 60,000 free eBooks.
In 1978, TCP/IP was developed to support real-time traffic. The creation of TCP/IP helped in creating a network communications protocol called User Datagram Protocol. The job of TCP is to break the data on the sender’s machine into packets and distribute them, meanwhile, IP protocol starts addressing and forwarding those packets, and soon after TCP reedifies them when those packets reach their destination.
The 1980s
Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf both American computer scientists developed TCP/IP, the set of protocols that regulates how data transfer through a network. This helped the ARPANET advancement into the Internet.
However, the birth of the internet was officially considered on 1st January 1983. In that same year, LANs and WANs enabled network games, where the Internet could run games with each other in client-server models.
The 1990s
Another invention took place when Tim Berners-Lee with his team invented the World Wide Web which came to life in 1990, and Mosaic was launched by Andreessen, this revolutionary browser increased the number of users by 16 million approx in 1995. The main purpose of developing WWW was to share automated information between scientists in universities around the globe but later it became a commercial platform for people.
The 2000s
The United States had more than twice as many Internet users as any other country, new internet users were 144.1 million relative growth was 152%, and half of the population was accessing information through the internet. But more than 90% population of Sub- Saharan Africa, the Pacific region and East Africa were not using the internet.
Every beautiful invention takes time so, like the internet, many scientists put their effort into this successful invention, among them, J. C. R. Licklider, Lawrence Roberts and Tim Berners-Lee played major roles in these invention processes. They never imagined that the whole world would be grateful for this incredible work. They deserve our lifelong gratitude.
