History of Internet

The history of the Internet has its origin in information theory and the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.

Computer science was an emerging discipline in the late 1950s that began to consider time-sharing between computer users, and later, the possibility of achieving this over wide area networks. J. C. R. Licklider developed the idea of a universal network at the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Independently, Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation proposed a distributed network based on data in message blocks in the early 1960s, and Donald Davies conceived of packet switching in 1965 at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), proposing a national commercial data network in the United Kingdom.

ARPA awarded contracts in 1969 for the development of the ARPANET project, directed by Robert Taylor and managed by Lawrence Roberts. ARPANET adopted the packet switching technology proposed by Davies and Baran, underpinned by mathematical work in the early 1970s by Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA. The network was built by a team at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, which included Bob Kahn.

Several early packet-switched networks emerged in the 1970s which researched and provided data networking. ARPA projects, international working groups and commercial initiatives led to the development of various standards and protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. Bob Kahn, now at DARPA, and Vint Cerf, at Stanford University, published research in 1974 that evolved into the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), two protocols of the Internet protocol suite. The design included concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin.

In the early 1980s, national and international public data networks emerged based on the X.25 protocol, the design of which included the work of Rémi Després. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded national supercomputing centers at several universities in the United States, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, thus creating network access to these supercomputer sites for research and academic organizations in the United States. International connections to NSFNET, the emergence of architecture such as the Domain Name System, and the adoption of TCP/IP internationally on existing networks marked the beginnings of the Internet."So, who really did invent the Internet?"
, Ian Peter, The Internet History Project, 2004. Retrieved 27 June 2014. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990. The optical backbone of the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic, as traffic transitioned to optical networks managed by Sprint, MCI and AT&T.

Research at CERN in Switzerland by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989–90 resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network. The dramatic expansion of capacity of the Internet with the advent of wave division multiplexing (WDM) and the roll out of fiber optic cables in the mid-1990s had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology. This made possible the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, video chat, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking services, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber-optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, and 800 Gbit/s by 2019. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was rapid in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007."The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information"
Martin Hilbert and Priscila López (2011), ''Science'', 332(6025), pp. 60–65; free access to the article through here: martinhilbert.net/WorldInfoCapacity.html The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking services. However, the future of the global network may be shaped by regional differences.

Foundations

Precursors

;Data communication
The concept of data communication – transmitting data between two different places through an electromagnetic medium such as radio or an electric wire – pre-dates the introduction of the first computers. Such communication systems were typically limited to point to point communication between two end devices. Semaphore lines, telegraph systems and telex machines can be considered early precursors of this kind of communication. The telegraph in the late 19th century was the first fully digital communication system.

;Information theory
Fundamental theoretical work on information theory was developed by Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley in the 1920s. Information theory, as enunciated by Claude Shannon, in the 1948, provided a firm theoretical underpinning to understand the trade-offs between signal-to-noise ratio, bandwidth, and error-free transmission in the presence of noise, in telecommunications technology. This was one of the three key developments, along with advances in transistor technology (specifically MOS transistors) and laser technology, that made possible the rapid growth of telecommunication bandwidth over the next half-century.

;Computers
Early computers in the 1940s had a central processing unit and user terminals. As the technology evolved in the 1950s, new systems were devised to allow communication over longer distances (for terminals) or with higher speed (for interconnection of local devices) that were necessary for the mainframe computer model. These technologies made it possible to exchange data (such as files) between remote computers. However, the point-to-point communication model was limited, as it did not allow for direct communication between any two arbitrary systems; a physical link was necessary. The technology was also considered vulnerable for strategic and military use because there were no alternative paths for the communication in case of a broken link.

Inspiration

The earliest computers were connected directly to terminals used by an individual user. Christopher Strachey, who became Oxford University's first Professor of Computation, filed a patent application for time-sharing in February 1959. In June that year, he gave a paper "Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers" at the UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris where he passed the concept on to J. C. R. Licklider.F. J. Corbató, et al.,
The Compatible Time-Sharing System A Programmer's Guide
' (MIT Press, 1963) . "the first paper on time-shared computers by C. Strachey at the June 1959 UNESCO Information Processing conference". Licklider, vice president at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., went on to propose a computer network in his January 1960 paper '' Man-Computer Symbiosis'':

In August 1962, Licklider and Welden Clark published the paper "On-Line Man-Computer Communication" which was one of the first descriptions of a networked future.

In October 1962, Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina as director of the newly established Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within DARPA, with a mandate to interconnect the United States Department of Defense's main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and SAC HQ. There he formed an informal group within DARPA to further computer research. He began by writing memos in 1963 describing a distributed network to the IPTO staff, whom he called "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network".

Although he left the IPTO in 1964, five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his vision of universal networking that provided the impetus for one of his successors, Robert Taylor, to initiate the ARPANET development. Licklider later returned to lead the IPTO in 1973 for two years.

Packet switching

The issue of connecting separate physical networks to form one logical network was the first of many problems. Early networks used message switched systems that required rigid routing structures prone to single point of failure. In the 1960s, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation produced a study of survivable networks for the U.S. military in the event of nuclear war. Information transmitted across Baran's network would be divided into what he called "message blocks". Independently, Donald Davies (National Physical Laboratory, UK), proposed and put into practice a local area network based on what he called packet switching, the term that would ultimately be adopted.

Packet switching is a rapid store and forward networking design that divides messages up into arbitrary packets, with routing decisions made per-packet. It provides better bandwidth utilization and response times than the traditional circuit-switching technology used for telephony, particularly on resource-limited interconnection links.

Networks that led to the Internet

NPL network

Following discussions with J. C. R. Licklider in 1965, Donald Davies became interested in data communications for computer networks. Later that year, at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Davies designed and proposed a national commercial data network based on packet switching. The following year, he described the use of an "Interface computer" to act as a router. The proposal was not taken up nationally but he produced a design for a local network to serve the needs of NPL and prove the feasibility of packet switching using high-speed data transmission. To deal with packet permutations (due to dynamically updated route preferences) and to datagram losses (unavoidable when fast sources send to a slow destinations), he assumed that "all users of the network will provide themselves with some kind of error control", thus inventing what came to be known the end-to-end principle. He and his team were one of the first to use the term 'protocol' in a data-commutation context in 1967. The network's development was described at a 1968 conference.

By 1968, Davies had begun building the Mark I packet-switched network to meet the needs of the multidisciplinary laboratory and prove the technology under operational conditions. The NPL local network and the ARPANET were the first two networks in the world to use packet switching, and the NPL network was the first to use high-speed links. Many other packet switching networks built in the 1970s were similar "in nearly all respects" to Davies' original 1965 design. The NPL team carried out simulation work on packet networks, including datagram networks, and research into internetworking and computer network security. The Mark II version which operated from 1973 used a layered protocol architecture. In 1976, 12 computers and 75 terminal devices were attached, and more were added until the network was replaced in 1986.

ARPANET

Robert Taylor was promoted to the head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1966. He intended to realize Licklider's ideas of an interconnected networking system. As part of the IPTO's role, three network terminals had been installed: one for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at University of California, Berkeley, and one for the Compatible Time-Sharing System project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Taylor's identified need for networking became obvious from the waste of resources apparent to him.

Bringing in Larry Roberts from MIT in January 1967, he initiated a project to build such a network. Roberts and Thomas Merrill had been researching computer time-sharing over wide area networks (WANs). Wide area networks emerged during the 1950s and became established during the 1960s. At the first ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967, Roberts presented a proposal for the "ARPA net", based on Wesley Clark's proposal to use Interface Message Processors to create a message switching network. At the conference, Roger Scantlebury presented Donald Davies' work on packet switching for data communications and mentioned the work of Paul Baran at RAND. Roberts incorporated the packet switching concepts into the ARPANET design and upgraded the proposed communications speed from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. Leonard Kleinrock subsequently developed the mathematical theory to model and measure the performance of this technology, building on his earlier work on queueing theory.

ARPA awarded the contract to build the network to Bolt Beranek & Newman, and the first ARPANET link was established between the Network Measurement Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science directed by Leonard Kleinrock, and the NLS system at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) directed by Douglas Engelbart in Menlo Park, California at 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969.

By December 1969, a four-node network was connected by adding the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara followed by the University of Utah Graphics Department. In the same year, Taylor helped fund ALOHAnet, a system designed by professor Norman Abramson

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