A brief history of the internet

BEIRUT: The internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of internet connections. Kleinrock’s packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. 

The internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US. 

Email was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the username and address. The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published as a Request for Comments (RFC) in 1972. RFC’s are a means of sharing developmental work throughout community. The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published as an RFC in 1973, and from then on RFC’s were available electronically to anyone who had use of the ftp protocol. 

The internet matured in the 70s as a result of the TCP/IP architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further developed by Kahn and Vint Cerf at Stanford and others throughout the 70’s. It was adopted by the Defense Department in 1980 replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP) and universally adopted by 1983. 

Similarly, BITNET (Because It’s Time Network) connected IBM mainframes around the educational community and the world to provide mail services beginning in 1981. Gateways were developed to connect BITNET with the internet and allowed exchange of email, particularly for email discussion lists. 

In 1991, the first really friendly interface to the Internet was developed at the University of Minnesota. The Gopher protocol was established. It is a TCP/IP Application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet, and was a predecessor, and later, an alternative to the World Wide Web. The protocol offers some features not natively supported by the web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on information stored on it. 

The development in 1993 of the graphical browser Mosaic by Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave the protocol its big boost. Later, Andreessen moved to become the brains behind Netscape Corp., which produced the successful graphical type of browser and server until Microsoft declared war and developed its MicroSoft Explorer. 

Since the internet was initially funded by the government, it was originally limited to research, education, and government uses. Microsoft’s full scale entry into the browser, server, and internet Service Provider market completed the major shift over to a commercially based internet. The release of Windows 98 in June 1998 with the Microsoft browser well integrated into the desktop shows Bill Gates’ determination to capitalize on the enormous growth of the internet. 

A current trend with major implications for the future is the growth of high speed connections. 56K modems and the providers who supported them spread widely for a while, but this is the low end now. 56K is not fast enough to carry multimedia, such as sound and video except in low quality. But new technologies many times faster, such as cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSL) are predominant now. 

Wireless has grown rapidly in the past few years, and travelers search for the wi-fi “hot spots” where they can connect while they are away from the home or office. A next big growth area is the surge towards universal wireless access, where almost everywhere is a “hot spot.” Municipal wi-fi or city-wide access, wiMAX offering broader ranges than wi-fi, EV-DO, 3g, and other formats will joust for dominance in the US in the years ahead. 

As the internet has become ubiquitous, faster, and increasingly accessible to non-technical communities, social networking and collaborative services have grown rapidly, enabling people to communicate and share interests in many more ways. – The Daily Star