A trip to almost any bookstore will find shelves of material written about the Internet. Learn more about how we are building a bigger, stronger Internet in In this paper, 3 several of us involved in the development and evolution of the Internet share our views of its origins and history. This history revolves around four distinct aspects. There is the technological evolution that began with early research on packet switching and the ARPANET and related technologies , and where current research continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as scale, performance, and higher-level functionality.
There is the operations and management aspect of a global and complex operational infrastructure. There is the social aspect, which resulted in a broad community of Internauts working together to create and evolve the technology. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting in an extremely effective transition of research results into a broadly deployed and available information infrastructure.
The Internet today is a widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of what is often called the National or Global or Galactic Information Infrastructure.
Its history is complex and involves many aspects — technological, organizational, and community. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use of online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community operations. The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.
He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept. Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July and the first book on the subject in Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major step along the path towards computer networking.
The other key step was to make the computers talk together. The result of this experiment was the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate for the job. The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in These last two nodes incorporated application visualization projects, with Glen Culler and Burton Fried at UCSB investigating methods for display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over the net, and Robert Taylor and Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating methods of 3-D representations over the net.
Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the networking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on how to utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day. Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software.
This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages.
From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design, beginning with the ARPANET as the pioneering packet switching network, but soon to include packet satellite networks, ground-based packet radio networks and other networks. The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking.
Up until that time there was only one general method for federating networks. This was the traditional circuit switching method where networks would interconnect at the circuit level, passing individual bits on a synchronous basis along a portion of an end-to-end circuit between a pair of end locations. Recall that Kleinrock had shown in that packet switching was a more efficient switching method.
Along with packet switching, special purpose interconnection arrangements between networks were another possibility.
While there were other limited ways to interconnect different networks, they required that one be used as a component of the other, rather than acting as a peer of the other in offering end-to-end service.
Each network can be designed in accordance with the specific environment and user requirements of that network. There are generally no constraints on the types of network that can be included or on their geographic scope, although certain pragmatic considerations will dictate what makes sense to offer.
This work was originally part of the packet radio program, but subsequently became a separate program in its own right. Key to making the packet radio system work was a reliable end-end protocol that could maintain effective communication in the face of jamming and other radio interference, or withstand intermittent blackout such as caused by being in a tunnel or blocked by the local terrain.
Kahn first contemplated developing a protocol local only to the packet radio network, since that would avoid having to deal with the multitude of different operating systems, and continuing to use NCP. If any packets were lost, the protocol and presumably any applications it supported would come to a grinding halt. In this model NCP had no end-end host error control, since the ARPANET was to be the only network in existence and it would be so reliable that no error control would be required on the part of the hosts.
Thus, Kahn decided to develop a new version of the protocol which could meet the needs of an open-architecture network environment. While NCP tended to act like a device driver, the new protocol would be more like a communications protocol. At this point he realized it would be necessary to learn the implementation details of each operating system to have a chance to embed any new protocols in an efficient way.
Thus, in the spring of , after starting the internetting effort, he asked Vint Cerf then at Stanford to work with him on the detailed design of the protocol. Cerf had been intimately involved in the original NCP design and development and already had the knowledge about interfacing to existing operating systems.
Subsequently a refined version was published in 7. Kahn had intended that the TCP protocol support a range of transport services, from the totally reliable sequenced delivery of data virtual circuit model to a datagram service in which the application made direct use of the underlying network service, which might imply occasional lost, corrupted or reordered packets.
However, the initial effort to implement TCP resulted in a version that only allowed for virtual circuits. This model worked fine for file transfer and remote login applications, but some of the early work on advanced network applications, in particular packet voice in the s, made clear that in some cases packet losses should not be corrected by TCP, but should be left to the application to deal with.
This led to a reorganization of the original TCP into two protocols, the simple IP which provided only for addressing and forwarding of individual packets, and the separate TCP, which was concerned with service features such as flow control and recovery from lost packets. Connecting the two together was far more economical that duplicating these very expensive computers. However, while file transfer and remote login Telnet were very important applications, electronic mail has probably had the most significant impact of the innovations from that era.
Email provided a new model of how people could communicate with each other, and changed the nature of collaboration, first in the building of the Internet itself as is discussed below and later for much of society.
A key concept of the Internet is that it was not designed for just one application, but as a general infrastructure on which new applications could be conceived, as illustrated later by the emergence of the World Wide Web. The Stanford team, led by Cerf, produced the detailed specification and within about a year there were three independent implementations of TCP that could interoperate. This was the beginning of long term experimentation and development to evolve and mature the Internet concepts and technology.
Beginning with the first three networks ARPANET, Packet Radio, and Packet Satellite and their initial research communities, the experimental environment has grown to incorporate essentially every form of network and a very broad-based research and development community. Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari also had significant market share.
SSL, short for Secure Sockets Layer, is a family of encryption technologies that allows web users to protect the privacy of information they transmit over the internet.
When you visit a secure website such as Gmail. Here's what that looks like in Google's Chrome browser:. That lock is supposed to signal that third parties won't be able to read any information you send or receive.
Under the hood, SSL accomplishes that by transforming your data into a coded message that only the recipient knows how to decipher.
If a malicious party is listening to the conversation, it will only see a seemingly random string of characters, not the contents of your emails, Facebook posts, credit card numbers, or other private information. SSL was introduced by Netscape in In its early years, it was only used on a few types of websites, such as online banking sites.
More recently, there has been a movement toward making the use of SSL universal. In , Mozilla announced that future versions of the Firefox browser would treat the lack of SSL encryption as a security flaw, as a way to encourage all websites to upgrade. Google is considering taking the same step with Chrome. The system is hierarchical. For example, the. Verisign assigns sub-domains like google.
Owners of these second-level domains, in turn, can create sub-domains such as mail. Because popular websites use domain names to identify themselves to the public, the security of DNS has become an increasing concern.
Criminals and government spies alike have sought to compromise DNS in order to impersonate popular websites such as facebook. ICANN was founded in There are two types of domain names. The first is generic top-level domains gTLDs such as. Because the internet originated in the United States, these domains tend to be most popular there. Authority over these domains is usually delegated to private organizations. There are also country-code top-level domains ccTLDs.
Each country in the world has its own 2-letter code. These domains are administered by authorities in each country. Some ccTLDs, such as. As a result, there may be dozens or even hundreds of new domains in the next few years. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all.
Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. The internet, explained By Timothy B. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. What is the internet? Where is the internet? The internet has three basic parts: The last mile is the part of the internet that connects homes and small businesses to the internet.
Data centers are rooms full of servers that store user data and host online apps and content. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather the focal point for an extensive community that includes more than 17 scientists from over countries. Although they typically spend some time on the CERN site, the scientists usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Reliable communication tools are therefore essential. The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the evolving technologies of computers, data networks and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.
Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a management proposal in November This outlined the principal concepts and it defined important terms behind the Web. He developed the code for his Web server on a NeXT computer. Another catalyst in the formation of the Internet was the heating up of the Cold War.
The Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred the U. Defense Department to consider ways information could still be disseminated even after a nuclear attack.
In response to this, other networks were created to provide information sharing.
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