February 10, 2010
Where Everything Started: The History Of The Internet
The need for the Internet arose from two things: universities wanted to be able to exchange information freely and the military was concerned about keeping their networks going in case of a major war. The history of the internet evolves around this research.
The initial development took place at the universities. They began to write network protocols that made it less difficult to exchange files between a server at one university and another. The military also took part in the research, because they had a vested interest in the outcome as far as network security was concerned.
These early rather basic networks were not intended for public use at all. They were used exclusively by researchers at the universities and by computer experts. The underlying idea remained the sharing of files between members of the network, so information could be accessible by all of them at the same time.
One such file sharing service was called FTP (File Transfer Protocol). It has been used for a couple of decades now and is still in use today. If you have your own website it’s highly likely you have also used FTP to upload your website files to the server of your hosting company.
Thousands and thousands of hours were spent on research at the universities during the ’80s and ’90s to develop a menu system, so any user could access a list of files that are available on the system and select a specific file for download simply by typing its name or selecting it.
A major step forward was when the researchers at the European Laboratory for particle physics (popularly called CERN) developed the hypertext protocol, which enabled users to embed links in a page and enabled anyone to access the relevant document by simply clicking on the link. It was what lead to the creation of the World Wide Web in 1991 and is in fact the principle that still drives the web today.
Soon after that another major development took place that changed the web forever. During 1993 the first web browser appeared on the scene. It was called Mosaic, and suddenly anyone could easily browse huge lists of files and navigate between those files simply by following the links embedded in each file.
At the beginning the web was intended solely for non-commercial use. Commercial use was frowned upon by the scientists who developed the whole system. They could, however, not keep the private networks out. During the 1990s commercial networks offering services such as email and web browsing started to spring up all over the place. The history of the Internet is a work in progress. Every day new developments take place and the end is not in sight yet.
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Filed under Web by Damian Papworth