A Brief History of the Internet

The internet was a twinkling in the eye of scientists and dreamers alike since before the second world war WWII. There were dreams of automated libraries, cybernetics to extend human abilities, and of global villages.

After the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite 1957, the Americans bounced back in 1969 with ARPA (Advanced Research Project Association) to regain the technological lead during the Cold War.

J. Licklider was appointed by ARPA to head IPTO in researching defences from space launched nuclear attacks. And it was IPTO as an organisation who considered the possibilities for a USA wide network of communications to help defend the states.

Scientists in the states and the UK invented packet switching and created a computer enabled to manage this, and from there ARPANET was created, linking the East coast of the US to the West coast. The aims of ARPAnet were to allow parts of the country to continue communicating and operating should an attack occur, reducing parts of the country without communication or leadership.

By the early 1970's the network was being used for passing of information that was not related to ARPAnet such as e-mail and electronic news. It was around this time that some engineers amused themselves by sending practical jokes, of false or annoying messages, and gained the name of hackers. These hackers were harmless, and did not produce and malicious attacks, but kept to jovial messages to people they knew personally.

Protocols were created in the 1980's to pass data across this small network and these were gradually upgraded and replaced as the networks expanded.

In the late 1980's the first known internet security issue arose, the Morris Worm debuted in 1988. With almost 90,000 computers networked together by this time, a large number of people were affected by the inability to communicate. This s when DARPA the new network defence ay received funding to create CERT to coordinate efforts to keep the network safe for future attacks.

By 1990 ARPANET was retired and a greater network linking the universities of the US together were created. At the same time in Europe EUnet was created to link the universities.

Following this and the popularity, the networks were opened up and expanded, and released to independent organisation to be managed from 1995.

And then boom we had the internet and all of the good and bad that has been created since. It has gone from a network based on the sharing of data for educational purposes to benefiting mankind in medicine, commerce and personal networking.

Courtesy: Matt Cowley