History of the Internet

In the beginning about 50 years ago, there was the computer. It was a massive, hulking mass of machinery stored within a housing structure with its own cooling processes. At this point, the bland and bulky technologic wonder could only complete one task at a time. This was called “Batch Processing”.

Now, with the main computer being kept in a cooling drum, developers couldn’t use the computer and called in for help. Specialists worked in an effort to connect to the main source and programming was created with a great deal of bugs, wasted time, and frustrated cries.

Finally, though, a remote connection was made and “Time Sharing” began to take form. Time sharing was much like a tree, where the main computer acted as a trunk with many smaller stations branching out.

Time marches on, and Sputnik was launched. The impact of Russian success of an unmanned satellite in space caused the Americans to be on panic as this was during the Cold War. What did Americans do in response? Create the “Defense Advance Research Project” of course. Due to the need of convenience, the “Arpanet” was born.

This was one of the four main cornerstone concepts of how the internet came to be.

Also in America, in due part thanks to the Rand Corporation, the military also came to develop a key concept of the history of the internet. In England, a commercial use was created by the National Physical Laboratory. Because of the scientific research of Cyclades, France had a hand in the foundation to modern internet.

But let us begin once again with the Arpanet. This concept created an “Interface Message Processor” to be used instead of the “Mainframe” computer. Combining these IMPs, a subnet was crafted, and information was shared between these IMPs while the Mainframe gathered and executed procedures.

In England, “Packet-switching” was born. Due to the commercial usage of the raw connections of networking, files were broken up and sent to later be pieced together again at the receiving end. Doing this, congestion of data streaming was minimal.

Following this path was the American military. During this time, missiles were found in Cuba, and the threat of hostile firing created a need for something other than the centralized network using long-range radio waves created at the moment. Thus, a distributed network with many nodes was born.

Finally, was France’s contribution to the internet. Cyclades not only coined the term “inter-net”, but also connected the nodes of many networks. They also founded a way to send data directly to the receiver, thus cutting time even more.

Thanks to the contributions of these four organizations, phone companies made use of their work and the internet was up and running, becoming the wonder it is today.