Learning objectives

When you have completed this session, you should be able to

• define term "Internet",
• list some important dates in history of Internet.

Reading
In order to view the curriculum online you need to integrate the learning object (the multimedia element) for example into a webpage. From this chapter it will come to light, how! First of all some history.

Internet history

In 1962, a nuclear confrontation seemed imminent. The United States (US) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were embroiled in the Cuban missile crisis. Both the US and the USSR were in the process of building hair-trigger nuclear ballistic missile systems. Each country pondered post-nuclear attack scenarios.

US authorities considered ways to communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. How could any sort of "command and control network" survive? Paul Baran, a researcher at RAND, offered a solution: design a more robust communications network using "redundancy" and "digital" technology.

The most important basic principle was that the network must not have any kind of centre. Some other priciples were very simple:

to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks.

The ARPANET was one of the "eve" networks of today's Internet. In an independent development, Donald Davies at the UK National Physical Laboratory also discovered the concept of packet switching in the early 1960s, first giving a talk on the subject in 1965.

The early ARPANET ran on the Network Control Program (NCP), a standard designed and first implemented in December 1970 by a team called the Network Working Group (NWG). To respond to the network's rapid growth as more and more locations connected, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn developed the first description of the now widely used TCP protocols during 1973.

The opening of the network to commercial interests began in 1988.
Although the basic applications and guidelines that make the Internet possible had existed for almost two decades, the network did not gain a public face until the 1990s. On 6 August 1991, CERN, a pan European organization for particle research, publicized the new World Wide Web project. The Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

By 1996 usage of the word Internet had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its use as a synonym in reference to the World Wide Web.

References:
Wikipedia