CYBER NOTES by Dave Benore
Where did this thing we call the Internet come from?
In the beginning…….
In 1957, The USSR launched Sputnik, the first man-made earth satellite. In response, in 1958 the USA created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DOD) to establish a lead in science and technology applicable to the military. ARPA went to work.
34 years ago, in 1969, ARPA funded, what turned out to be, a very special project. The project was to network computers of DOD, the military, and universities doing military research. (Networking means to allow different computers to “talk” to each other.) The network was to link computers in such a way as to keep communications flowing even if some parts of the physical communication network (wires) were damaged, for instance by a war. The project was, in a real sense, an experiment. Could it be done?
The project invented a network called ARPANET, for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It started small, linking three computers in California with one in Utah, but it worked! It quickly grew to cover the continent. It used a scheme called dynamic routing, which is a fancy way of saying if one communication route failed to work, the system would automatically find another that did work! (It really means that if some contractor cuts a cable somewhere, the network will not be shut down. It’s backhoe-resistant!)
The ARPANET was wildly successful. Every university in the country wanted to connect to it so the system became so big it became unwieldy. So the ARPANET was broken into two parts; one for the military, called MILNET; and one for non-military use, called ARPANET. However the two systems still could talk to each other through a technical scheme called Internet Protocol (IP). (The two systems “spoke” the same language.) IP allowed for almost an unlimited number of computers to “talk” to each other as equals. This was new stuff!
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Workstations, a kind of super personal computer, came into use--replacing large main frame computers. All at once there were thousands of computers on the ARPANET, instead of hundreds. ARPANET started to have difficulty handling the traffic. Something better was needed!
Enter the National Science Foundation (NSF), who decided to set up five supercomputer centers for research use. (Supercomputers are very large, very fast, and very expensive--$10 million each.) The NSF expected researchers to send their programs to a supercomputer center to be run, and get their results back, all over a network. Using ARPANET did not work out well for the NSF so they made their own new and much faster network system, the NSFNET. NSFNET created many regional networks, and then connected them together. It worked like a charm. By 1990, so much business had moved from the ARPANET to NSFNET that ARPANET was shut down. The supercomputer center idea however died out. It never worked well enough because workstations were a lot cheaper to operate. But the NSFNET was too good to die so it lived on under a new name, the Internet.
Several large commercial Internet networks grew up by 1994. The NSFNET was only supposed to be used for research and education, but the commercial networks could be used for anything that was legal. Email is a prime example. As commercial networks grew, NSFNET wound down. Went phffftt! The commercial networks handled all that NSFNET used to process. Today we know these commercial networks as Internet Providers (IPs).
Outside the United States, other countries have set up their own networks to connect to the Internet, using the same IP. So we can “talk” to other computers all over the world. What Sputnik and our government started, commerce has taken over. So we have world wide connectivity, the Internet, all because the DOD was worried about a war!
(Source: The Internet for Dummies, 4th edition, and the Internet!)
