Internet as an invention. Who created the Internet and when? History of the Internet. Who created the Internet and when
The Internet (from the English Internet) is a worldwide system of voluntarily united computer networks, built on the use of the IP protocol and routing of data packets. The Internet forms a global information space, serves as the physical basis for the World Wide Web and many data transmission systems (protocols). Often referred to as the World Wide Web and the Global Network.
History of appearance.
After the Soviet Union launched the artificial Earth satellite in 1957, the US Department of Defense decided that in case of war, America needed a reliable information transmission system. The US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) proposed to develop a computer network for this, which was called ARPANET (English). AdvancedResearchProjectsAgencyNetwork), and in 1969, within the framework of the project, the network united four scientific institutions. Then the ARPANET network began to actively grow and develop, scientists from different fields of science began to use it.
First ARPANET server was installed on September 1, 1969 at UCLA.
By 1971, the first program for sending email over the network was developed, and the program immediately became very popular.
In 1973, the first foreign organizations from Great Britain and Norway were connected to the network via a transatlantic telephone cable, and the network became international.
In the 1970s, the network was primarily used for sending email, and the first mailing lists, news groups, and bulletin boards emerged. However, at that time the network could not yet easily interact with other networks built on other technical standards.
By the end of the 1970s, data transfer protocols began to develop rapidly, which were standardized in 1982-83.
On January 1, 1983, the ARPANET switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP, which is still successfully used to connect (or, as they also say, “layer”) networks. It was in 1983 that the term “Internet” was assigned to the ARPANET network.
In 1984, the Domain Name System (DNS) was developed.
In 1984, the ARPANET network had a serious rival, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) founded an extensive inter-university network NSFNet (abbreviated from the English National Science Foundation Network), which was made up of smaller networks (including the then famous Usenet and Bitnet networks) and had much greater bandwidth than ARPANET. Over the course of a year, about 10 thousand computers connected to this network, and the title “Internet” began to smoothly pass to NSFNet.
In 1988, the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol was invented, making real-time communication possible on the Internet.
In 1989 in Europe, within the walls of the European Council for Nuclear Research (French Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, CERN), the concept of the World Wide Web was born. It was proposed by the famous British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who, within two years, developed the HTTP protocol, the HTML language and URIs.
In 1990, the ARPANET network ceased to exist, completely losing competition to NSFNet. In the same year, the first connection to the Internet via a telephone line was recorded.
In 1991, the World Wide Web became available to the public on the Internet, and in 1993, the famous NCSA Mosaic web browser appeared. The World Wide Web was gaining popularity.
There are many opinions about who exactly invented the Internet. Even several people are called “parents” of the World Wide Web. Well-known media figure Gordon Crovitz considered it necessary to present his version of the birth.
“Who invented the Internet?” asked former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz. And he answered it from the pages of the same publication. One of the most common versions is that the Internet was created by order of the US government for military purposes, but this legend has little to do with the truth, Crovitz wrote.
The creation of the Internet by the US government is just one of the urban legends. “The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet because it needed to maintain communications even in the event of a nuclear attack,” writes Crovitz.
According to the official version, in the 50s of the last century, during the Cold War, the US Department of Defense began to think about the need to create a reliable, trouble-free information transmission system. As one of the options, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now DARPA) proposed developing a computer network. The project was entrusted to four organizations: the universities of California, Santa Barbara, Utah and the Stanford Research Center. They created the ARPAnet. The work began in 1957, and only 12 years later - in 1969 - the network connected the computers of the listed universities.
However, the idea of the Internet itself arose earlier, Crovitz recalls. During World War II, US President Theodore Roosevelt's scientific advisor, Vannevar Bush, was part of a group of scientists involved in the Manhattan Project [the code name for the US nuclear weapons program]. Later, in 1946, he wrote an article “How We Can Think,” in which he proposed a prototype of a device that could “expand human memory” - Memex. This device was presented as a kind of “repository” for all human knowledge, amenable to formal description, and capable of quickly finding and providing the necessary information. Many technology enthusiasts see Memex's description as a prediction of the Internet.
Of course, at that time this was perceived by many as a figment of a wild imagination. But already in the late sixties, engineers tried to combine several communication networks into one “global” network, that is, in fact, to create a prototype of the “World Wide Web”. As Gordon Crovitz writes, the federal government's involvement in this project was modest - through the ARPA agency. But the purpose of the project was not to maintain communications during a nuclear attack, and, in fact, ARPAnet was not pro-Internet, if you understand the Internet as the connection of two or more computer networks, Robert Taylor, who led the 60 s project at ARPA.
“But if the Internet was not invented by the government, then by whom?” - Gordon Crovitz continues to ask. Vinton Cerf created the TCP/IP protocol, the basis of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee became the “father of the World Wide Web”, embodying the idea of hyperlinks.
But the main credit goes to the company where Robert Taylor moved after working at ARPA - Xerox. It was in the Xerox PARC laboratory, located in Silicon Valley, that Ethernet technology was developed in 1970, designed to transfer data between various computer networks. As we know today, the same laboratory developed the Xerox Alto personal computer and graphical user interface.
Michael Hiltzik's book Dealers of Lightning, which tells the story of Xerox PARC, also provides information about the creation of Ethernet. At some point, the leading researchers at the laboratory realized that the government was too busy with other matters to care about connecting various computer networks into a single Network. Therefore, they had to deal with this issue themselves. At the same time, Xerox PARC employees blamed ARPA, which, while receiving government funding, worked, in their opinion, too slowly.
Later, in one of his letters, Robert Taylor wrote: “I believe that the Internet was created at Xerox PARC, around 1975, when we linked Ethernet and ARPAnet through PUP (PARC Universal Protocol).”
So, the Internet was created at Xerox PARC. “But then why didn’t Xerox become the world’s largest company?” - the author of the article asks another question. The answer is simple and obvious: the company's management was too focused on the core business to notice innovative developments and calculate their potential.
Xerox executives at the company's headquarters in Rochester, New York, were too focused on selling copiers. From their point of view, Ethernet could only be used so that people in the same office could link several computers to share a copier.
Many people know the story of how in 1979, Apple founder Steve Jobs came to Xerox PARC for ideas - he entered into an agreement with Xerox management under which he could gain access to any innovative developments of the laboratory. “They just didn’t know what they were,” Jobs later said, who helped make Apple a great company thanks in part to developments he learned from Xerox.
However, the sale of copiers brought profit to Xerox for decades. The company's name even became synonymous with the copier. But Xerox missed the boat, and in the era of the digital revolution, company managers can only console themselves with the thought that only a few manage to successfully move from one technological era to another.
In 1995, the development of the Internet came completely under the control of commercial companies. The part of the network controlled by the supercomputers of the US National Science Foundation was left with only its own narrow niche. Since this year, the commercial Internet began to grow at an explosive pace, although before that it had been “languishing” under government control for almost 30 years. In less than 10 years, companies have achieved a real technological revolution, which, according to Gordon Crovitz, once again proves the greater role of business than government.
To build a successful technology business, both factors must be present: disruptive technology and the special skills to bring it to market. The contrast between Apple and Xerox shows that few business leaders can succeed in the face of such a daunting task. It is they, and not the government, who bear the main credit.
To begin with, it is worth defining what the Internet is. Internet is a system of unified computer networks. It is based on the routing of various data packets, as well as the use of IP protocols. Another definition of the word “Internet” suggests that it is a global information system.
Most often when people talk about Internet(or they also call it the Global Network or the World Wide Web), they do not think about complex interacting systems. For them Internet- simply information that they can receive at any time of the day.
So how did it appear? Internet? What's its story?
In 1957, the USSR artificial satellite was launched. After this event, the United States began to think about the need to create a high-quality information broadcast system. As a result, the agency ARPA proposed the creation of the innovative ARPANET computer network. On September 1, 1969, the world's first server for this computer network was installed at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Later, already in 1971, they designed a popular program that made it possible to send emails from one mailbox on the network to another. Within 2 years, with the connection of Norway and Great Britain to the US network, ARPANET became an international system. Of course, in 1970 the network was used exclusively for exchanging emails, but after 10 years the capabilities were expanded and data transfer protocols began to develop.
January 1, 1983 is considered a significant day. It was from this moment ARPANET became the well-known “Internet”. Then, a year after this event, domain name systems were developed.
As the network’s popularity grew, many realized that this project would be very profitable. Therefore, ARPANET had a competitor in 1984 - the NSFNet network. The US National Science Foundation created this network, which had higher capacity. Moreover, it included smaller networks known at that time (Bitnet, Usenet). The popularity of the competitive network began to grow at tremendous speed. More and more people began to connect to it.
In 1990, NSFNet completely won ARPANET and rightfully took over the title of “Internet”. In addition, this year the world's first connection to the Internet via telephone line took place. By this time, people could already communicate with each other in real time, and Tim Bernes-Lee (he created the HTML language, the HTTP protocol, URL identifiers) had already designed the concept of the World Wide Web.
By 1991 the concept World Wide Web was fully developed and put into operation. From that moment on, her popularity grew continuously. In 1995, the high-tech computers of the US National Science Foundation stopped routing Internet traffic and transferred this role to network providers.
Global networking occurred in 1990. Many agreed to this merger due to the fact that there was no one leader, and all the networks actually remained independent. By 1997, a huge number of domain names and computers were registered on the Internet. The Internet has become a full-fledged leader among the various means that make it possible to exchange information.
The popularity of the Internet is not in doubt. Moreover, there is even World Internet Day, which takes place annually on September 30th. This holiday was established by Pope John Paul II in 1998.
Almost half of the world's population already uses the Internet. People know that you can find a lot of useful and interesting information on the Internet, and, in general, they are used to it. Who invented the Internet? What's its story? How did this network become so widespread and how does it work? Below you will read the answers to these and other questions.
The Internet is so closely intertwined with our lives that it is even difficult to imagine that it once did not exist. This is truly a worldwide phenomenon. But few people thought that the story of how this means of communication arose is very interesting. So who invented the Internet? What caused such an incredible increase in popularity?
Start
If we try to trace the origins of this phenomenon, we will see that the history of the Internet goes back to the first networks between computers. They appeared in 1956. A year later, the US Department of Defense decided to begin developing new technologies that could be used to reliably transmit information in the event of danger. DARPA (American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) proposed using computer networks for this purpose. This is what marked the beginning of the information age. Of course, the Internet as we know it appeared much later.
WAN prototype
The creation of the World Wide Web did not happen overnight, but in stages. The design and development of the network was entrusted to four major US scientific institutions. These are the California State Universities of Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, the University of Utah and the Stanford Research Center. They joined together in a network called ARPANET. This happened in 1969.
Subsequently, other institutions joined this project of the Ministry of Defense. The world's first server was installed in September of the same 1969. The computer, called the Honeywell DP-516, was negligibly imperfect by today's standards: its RAM capacity was only 24 kilobytes.
One more person can be called the progenitor of the Network. This is Joseph Likelider. He was one of the first scientists to actively promote the idea of creating global networks back in 1960.
Birthday
Finally we come to a significant event. On October 29, 1969, Charles Charlie Cline, who was in Los Angeles, tried to establish a remote connection with a computer at Stanford, located 640 kilometers away. Bill Duvall received the data. He also had to confirm the success of the experiment over the phone. The idea was to transmit the LOGIN command remotely, that is, log in to the system. But the first pancake was lumpy - only the first two letters were sent, the transmission was disrupted. But the experimenters quickly resumed the operation, and data transfer was successfully completed at approximately 10:30 p.m. We can say that this date is the actual birthday of the Internet.
Further development
When experimentally testing the effectiveness of the new technology, the systematic development of the necessary software began to allow the programs to work. So, in 1971, the first email client was invented. Of course, this is not the software that is used today, but its popularity quickly grew.
Already in 1973, the network began to globalize. New institutions and organizations, including European ones, began to make their contribution. The first countries to connect to the global network were Great Britain and Norway. The connection was made via a transatlantic telephone line.
In general, in the 1970s, the main services available on the Internet were email, news, and classifieds. Even mailing lists had already appeared then, although there was no spam yet. Everything was done to make business easier. Spam appeared a little later.
Network Engineering
Using the Internet turned out to be quite simple and clear. But there was still much to be done. In particular, at that time there was no interaction with other computer networks that were built in accordance with other standards. The creators, engineers and programmers had a complex and interesting task: it was necessary to develop a protocol that would standardize and make it possible for different networks to work together.
Jon Postel played a huge role in solving this problem. It was he who invented the concept of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which replaced the previously used NCP. With the help of TCP/IP, networks are combined (or merged). The protocol was officially approved in 1983 (later, however, it was repeatedly amended and improved). Thus, the name of Jon Postel deserves to be mentioned among the names of the inventors of the Internet or those who made significant contributions to its work.
At the same time, the ARPANET network is increasingly called the Internet. By the way, this name itself is an abbreviation of the phrase INTERconnected NETworks, which means “interconnected networks.” And in 1984, the development and implementation of the domain name system was completed. The scientific name of this system is Domain Name Server, DNS. Thanks to this, we now write website addresses in letters. If there was no DNS, we would have to record the IP address. Chat rooms that allow us to communicate, real-time communication - all this works using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) technology, which was created in 1988.
Another predecessor
In 1984, another major intercollegiate network, NFCnet, was launched in the United States. It began to seriously compete with ARPANET. It united several small networks, its throughput was much higher. In the first year, about 10 thousand computers connected to it. What's interesting is that NFCnet used the principle of "backbone networks." This increased communication stability, speed and reliability. In 1993, these networks were replaced by more advanced NAPs, or, more simply put, access points. This greatly expanded the capabilities of the World Wide Web.
World Wide Web, or WWW
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist who worked at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), played a big role in making the Internet popular among ordinary users. It was he who invented the concept of the World Wide Web. Within two years he developed HTTP, a system of URIs and HTML identifiers. It is a programming language using hypertext markup. Thanks to this, almost all sites are written in HTML (all other options appeared much later). Using HTTP technology, users access the vast majority of Internet resources, and URLs are the names we see in the address bar of a web browser.
So what we're looking at is just a website. And the Internet is a network through which information and servers are accessed. Although this is not the same thing, in common parlance it is common to call all this the Internet.
A few more facts
The last transition to the modern Internet occurred in 1990. Then the first connection to the network was made via a telephone line. The World Wide Web became accessible to everyone in 1991. In 1993, the first web browser was developed by Mark Andersen. It enabled the rapid spread of the internet due to its clear and well-designed user interface. It also allowed for content development. In 1995, the WWW protocol took first place in terms of the amount of information it was capable of transmitting.
What about today?
At the end of the last century, the Internet united almost all individual networks and grew significantly in the field of hardware and software. But most importantly, in 5 years its audience has already reached more than 50 million users. It took television 13 years to reach the same figure. Today, more than 2 billion people use the World Wide Web. Various services have appeared, such as video streaming, cloud storage, social networks and blogs, forums and telephony, as well as much more. A huge amount of information can be transmitted at almost instantaneous speed. Access is now obtained via satellite, mobile communications, cable and fiber optic highways from almost anywhere in the world. We can no longer imagine our lives without the Internet.
The Internet is, without exaggeration, the main technological breakthrough of recent decades. But by whom and when was it invented? In fact, the invention of the Internet is a rather complicated story, and we will sort it out in this post.
First Internet projects
For the first time, ideas and projects for a global computer network appeared in the early 1960s. In 1962, in the USA, Joseph Licklider, who was then working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a series of notes in which he described the concept of the “Galactic Network”. The name was a joke, and Licklider saw the main purpose of this network in the convenient exchange of data and program code, but his concept really described some of the principles of a global computer network, reminiscent of the modern Internet. Soon Licladyer became the head of DARPA's information technology department, and largely thanks to his efforts, after some time this agency began implementing the project of one of the first computer networks, ARPANET.
V. M. Glushkov
In the same 1962, an article by Academician Kharkevich was published in the Soviet Union, in which he wrote about the need to create a nationwide computer network that would allow all institutions to exchange information and become the basis for planning and management in a variety of industries. Soon, Academician Glushkov came up with an even more detailed project, called OGAS (National Automated System of Accounting and Information Processing). The project involved the creation of a unified computer network in the USSR; within the framework of the project, it was planned to create 6,000 computer centers and train 300 thousand IT specialists. Khrushchev approved the plan and its implementation began, but after Brezhnev came to power, the Soviet bureaucracy began to openly sabotage the project. Instead of a single network, Soviet ministries began to build their own computer centers, not connected to each other, and attempts to network them did not go beyond experiments. Thus, the USSR missed the opportunity to overtake the West in the field of information technology.
OGAS Glushkova
ARPANET
In 1964, two years later than in the USSR, the implementation of the ARPANET network project began in the USA. But, unlike the USSR, there this project was completed. In 1969, this network began operating, although at first there were only 4 nodes.
ARPANET in 1969
Later, many began to consider this year the year the Internet appeared. But in fact, the ARPANET network was quite far from the modern Internet. The main problem that they tried to solve with the help of this network was the task of optimal use of computer power. Computers were still quite expensive, and if someone could remotely connect to another computer and use its power when it was idle, it would be a big savings. Due to various difficulties, this task was never realized, but ARPANET continued to develop.
Larry Roberts
In 1972, Larry Roberts, one of the developers of ARPANET, who by then had replaced Licklider as director of DARPA's IT department, organized an international conference on computer communications in Washington. At this conference, an ARPANET demonstration was held, during which anyone could connect to 20 computers from different cities in the United States and execute different commands on them. At the time, the demonstration made a big impression on skeptics who did not believe in the reality of computer networks.
In 1972, electronic mail appeared on the ARPANET. Soon the transmission of messages by e-mail became one of the most popular functions of ARPANET. Some even believe that email “saved” ARPANET, making this network truly useful and in demand. Then other ways to use the network began to appear - file transfer, instant messaging, bulletin boards, etc. However, ARPANET was not yet the Internet. And the first obstacle to the further development of the network was the lack of a universal protocol that would allow computers of different types and with different software to exchange information.
TCP/IP protocol
The variety of hardware and software created enormous difficulties for connecting computers into a network. To overcome them, in 1973, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn decided to create a universal information exchange protocol that would allow connecting a variety of computers and local networks.
Vinton ("Screw") Surf
Robert ("Bob") Kahn
The protocol was named TCP (Transmission-Control Protocol, or Transmission Control Protocol). Later, the protocol was divided into two parts and called TCP/IP (IP - Internet Protocol). By the way, at the same time, around the mid-70s, the word “Internet” itself appeared.
The development of the protocol took quite a long time. Initially, many doubted that small computers were even capable of supporting such a complex protocol. It was not until 1977 that the first data transmission using this protocol was demonstrated. And ARPANET switched to a new protocol only in 1983.
And in 1984, the first DNS server was launched, which made it possible to use domain names instead of poorly remembered IP addresses.
Development of computer networks and the end of ARPANET
In the late 70s, the first personal computers designed for home use appeared. In the 80s, more and more such computers began to appear, and computer networks also developed at the same time. Along with government and scientific ones, commercial and amateur networks appeared, to which one could connect via a modem through a telephone line. However, the functions of computer networks were still quite limited and were limited mainly to sending e-mail and exchanging messages and files through electronic bulletin boards (BBS). This was still not the Internet we were used to.
ARPANET, which at one time served as an impetus for the development of computer networks, fell into decay, and in 1989 this network was closed. The Pentagon, which financed DARPA, did not really need it, and the military segment of this network was separated from the civilian segment back in the early 80s. At the same time, the alternative global network NSFNET, created in 1984 by the US National Science Foundation, was actively developing. This network originally united American universities. In the mid-1980s, this network pioneered the use of high-speed data lines at 1.5 Mbps instead of the 56 Kbps that was the standard for modems and telephone lines. In the late 80s, the remnants of ARPANET became part of NSFNET, and NSFNET itself would become the core of the worldwide Internet in the early 90s. This will not happen right away, however, since the network was initially intended to be used only for scientific and educational purposes, but then these restrictions were eventually lifted. In 1994, NSFNET was effectively privatized and completely opened up for commercial use.
WWW
But in order for the Internet to become as we know it, in addition to computer networks and a universal protocol, something else had to be invented. This something was the technology of organizing websites. It was she who made the Internet truly popular and widespread.
Tim Berners-Lee
In 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee was working on a document review system at CERN (the famous international nuclear research center in Switzerland). And then it occurred to him, based on the hypertext markup that he used in documents, to implement a large-scale project. The project was given the name World Wide Web.
For 2 years, Tim Berners-Lee worked hard on the project. During this time, he developed the HTML language for creating web pages, a method for specifying page addresses in the form of URLs, the HTTP protocol and the first browser.
On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee launched the first website on the Internet. It contained basic information about WWW technology, how to view documents, and how to download a browser.
This is how the first users saw the world's first website
In 1993, the first browser with a graphical interface appeared. In the same year, CERN issued a statement notifying that WWW technology would not be protected by any copyright and its free use was allowed to everyone. This wise decision led to an explosion in the number of sites on the Internet and to the emergence of the Internet as we know it today. Already in 1995, the WWW service became the most used service compared to all others (e-mail, file transfer, etc.), and for modern users it is practically synonymous with the Internet.
So who invented the Internet? The inventor of the Internet is not one person. But of those who made the greatest personal contribution to its appearance, the following people can be distinguished.
- Initiators of the creation and developers of ARPANET. Among them we can distinguish such people as Joseph Licklider, Larry Roberts, and Paul Baran And Bob Taylor.
- Creators of the TCP/IP protocol: Screw Surf And Bob Kahn.
- Creator of WWW Tim Berners-Lee.
The emergence of RuNet
The first computer networks appeared in the USSR a long time ago, even earlier than in the West. The first experiments in this area date back to 1952, and in 1960 a network was already deployed in the USSR, connecting computers as part of the missile defense system. Later, specialized civilian networks appeared, designed, for example, to record railway and air tickets. Unfortunately, the development of general purpose networks has had major problems due to pervasive bureaucracy.
In the 1980s, Soviet scientists began to connect to foreign networks for the first time, at first only sporadically, for example, to hold some conferences on scientific topics. In 1990, the first Soviet computer network, Relcom, appeared, uniting scientific institutions from different cities of the USSR. Its creation was carried out by employees of the Institute of Atomic Energy named after. Kurchatova. In the same year, the su zone was registered - the domain zone of the Soviet Union (the ru zone appeared only in 1994). In the fall of 1990, Relcom established its first connections with foreign countries. In 1992, Relcom introduced the TCP/IP protocol and established a connection to the European EUnet network. Runet is becoming a full-fledged part of the Internet.
