Brief history

Welcome to a tour through the history of the Internet!
We suppose you know the history of the Net already a bit, but some beginners may don't know enough about it! This page should help you to understand Internet a bit better. Have fun!

You might not believe it, but the Net's roots are in the 700 BC!! Homing pigeons carry messages in ancient Greece.

The discovery of electricity and using it in communications like in Morse code has opened the door for the revolution of communication technology.

1950s, the time of the Beatles, of Flower-Power and Hippies.The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In response, the United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.

At the 60s were the time of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the USA. Both countries built more and more atomic weapons, and both of them had the power to wipe out whole cities or even countries.

So the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold War thinking machine, faced a strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear attack? If one computer of a network was destroyed, communication would be impossible. And if there was a central authority, it would surely be the first target for an atomic bomb. So RAND invented a new kind of network. In 1964, the RAND proposal was put forward. Written by Paul Baran, this proposal stated that the new network would have no central authority.

Besides, it would be designed to operate while in tatters. The principles of this network were: All the nodes would be equal in status, each could send and receive messages.

All the messages would be sent in packets, each with its own address. These packets would be sent at one node and would arrive at another one. This may seem rather obvious, but what was new was that the way the packets went through the net was not important. That means that if one node was destroyed, the rest of the nodes would still be able to communicate. This is of course inefficient and rather slow, but extremely reliable. The Internet still uses this method nowadays, and there has been only one collective crash so far.

The first test network built on these principles was installed in National Research Laboratory in Great Britain in 1968. Shortly afterwards, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) wanted to installed a more advanced network based on the same principles in the USA. The network consisted of four high speed computers. In 1969, the first node was installed in UCLA.

In 1970s
There were 23 nodes on ARPANET: The first node (1969) was in UCLA, other nodes were in the Stanford Research Institute, the University of Utah and the UCSB.

ARPANET was constructed because computer time was precious and expensive at that time and the ARPANET offered the scientists possibilities to share their computers using long distance computing. This is nearly unbelievable nowadays, for instance a normal PC has 16 Megabytes of RAM today. This is very sharp contrast to the University of Utah's computer. This Honeywell 516 mini computer had 12 Kilobytes of RAM!

1972
1972 was a key year. Ray Tomlinson of BBN invented the first e-mail program. But why is this that important? Over the years, an odd fact became clear. Instead of using the ARPANET for long distance computing, the scientists used it for communicating with each other, of course for sharing results of their experiments or something, but also mainly for gossiping! (Each user had his/her own e-mail address.)

1973
The first international nodes were set up. These were located in England and Norway. The growth of ARPANET was possible because you could use any platform to connect to it. (This is still the case with today's Internet.)
One year later Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published "A protocol for Packet Network Internetworking" which specified the design of a TCP.

1976
UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) was released.

1979
USENET was established using UUCP.

1981
National Science Foundation created backbone called CSNET 56 Kbps network for institutions without access to ARPANET. Vinton Cerf proposed a plan for an inter-network connection between CSNET and the ARPANET.

1982
The TCP/IP protocol was established for ARPANET. This protocol became standard (instead of NCP) on 1st January 1983. The name "Internet" was first used.

1983
ARPANET split into ARPANET and the military segment, MILNET. MILNET became integrated with the Defense Data Network created the previous year. The new protocol standard and even more the split-up were important cut-overs for ARPANET, keeping in mind that it was originally created for military purposes.
Thanks to TCP/IP and its decentralized structure, ARPANET grew and grew during the early eighties.
The Name Server was developed at the University of Wisconsin.

1984
The number of hosts broke 1.000.
The Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced.

1985
The National Science Foundation began deploying its new T1 lines, which would be finished by 1988.

1986
The National Science Foundation (NSF) wanted to make supercomputers useable for research projects, so they decided to link five super-computing centers. First they wanted to use ARPANET for connecting the computers, but ARPANET's bureaucracy and shortage of staff kept NSF from using this solution.

So they built their own network using the IP-protocol of ARPANET. NSF linked the five centers. (56 Kbps). But apparently they could not link the universities with this network, simply because they didn't have enough money for building cables to every university.

The solution: The schools and universities of one region were linked together and this network was linked to one of the supercomputers.
The "traffic" in this network increased steadily and so the computers and the lines were soon to slow to handle the massive amount of data.

1987
NSF signed a contract with Merit Networks to increase the performance of the network. The computing centers and lines have been upgraded ever since.
-- 10.000 hosts --

1988
Soon after the completion of the T1 NSFNET backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgrading the network again.

Merit and its partners formed a not for profit corporation called ANS, Advanced Network Systems, which was to conduct research into high speed networking. It soon came up with the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps line. NSF quickly adopted the new network and by the end of 1991 all of its sites were connected by this new backbone.

1989
-- 100.000 hosts --

1990
While the T3 lines were being constructed, the Department of Defense disbanded the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone. The original 50Kbs lines of ARPANET were taken out of service.

Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to the members of the international high-energy physics community.

1991
CSNET (which consisted of 56Kbps lines) was discontinued having fulfilled its important early role in the provision of academic networking service. A key feature of CREN is that its operational costs are fully met through dues paid by its member organizations.

The NSF established a new network, named NREN, the National Research and Education Network. The purpose of this network is to conduct high speed networking research. It was not to be used as a commercial network, nor was it to be used to send a lot of the data that the Internet now transfers.

1992
Internet Society is chartered.

World-Wide Web released by CERN.

NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps)

1993
InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services: directory and database services (by AT&T), registration services (by Network Solutions Inc.), and information services (by General Atomics/CERFnet).

Marc Andreessen and NCSA and the University of Illinois develops a graphical user interface to the WWW, called "Mosaic for X".

1994
No major changes were made to the physical network. The most significant thing that happened was the growth. Many new networks were added to the NSF backbone. Hundreds of thousands of new hosts were added to the INTERNET during this time period.

Pizza Hut offers pizza ordering on its Web page.

First Virtual, the first cyberbank, opens.

ATM (Asynchronous Transmission Mode, 145Mbps) backbone is installed on NSFNET.

1995
The National Science Foundation announced that as of April 30, 1995 it would no longer allow direct access to the NSF backbone. The National Science Foundation contracted with four companies that would be providers of access to the NSF backbone (Merit). These companies would then sell connections to groups, organizations, and companies.

$50 annual fee is imposed on domains, excluding .edu and .gov domains which are still funded by the National Science Foundation.

1996
Most Internet traffic is carried by backbones of independent ISPs, including MCI, AT&T, Sprint, UUnet, BBN planet, ANS, and more.

Currently the Internet Society, the group that controls the INTERNET, is trying to figure out new TCP/IP to be able to have billions of addresses, rather than the limited system of today. The problem that has arisen is that it is not known how both the old and the new addressing systems will be able to work at the same time during a transition period.