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History of the Internet

The Internet began in 1957 with the launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to fund and coordinate defense-related scientific research. In 1969, supercomputers at four sites--the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City--were linked by telephone connections, and the ARPANET was born. ARPANET was an experimental, wide-area computer network introduced by the U.S. government in the early 1960s. The purpose of ARPANET was to allow government contractors to share expensive, scarce computing resources; it spanned the United States and was the predecessor to the Internet.

The ARPANET was a product of the Cold War, and its structure reflected Cold War strategies. Designers of the ARPANET were concerned that it be able to continue to function after a nuclear attack. Therefore, the network was given a noncentralized, web-like design to ensure that if one or several network computers or connections were destroyed, the remaining computers on the Net would still be able to communicate. They linked every computer to every other computer in the system in a modified peer-to-peer network. The goal of ARPANET was to allow government contractors to share expensive, scarce computing resources. Those who had access to ARPANET could communicate with others involved in similar research.

An increasing mix of nonmilitary users began to transform the Net into an international communications vehicle for the academic world. The Net proved to be such a good means of linking government and academic institutions that it formed the National Science Foundation (NSF). In 1986, the NSF created NSFnet to connect scientific researchers in universities. NSFnet provided a high-speed communications backbone for the emerging Internet, and many more universities connected to the system.

The real growth of the Internet came after the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW), also known as W3, or simply "the Web". In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a graphical interface program for finding documents on the Web, the first Web browser. The browser allows the navigation of Web pages. This was followed by the creation of another browser, called Mosaic, by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The creation of Mosaic and subsequent browsers made the Web easier to use and contributed to a rapid growth in new Web users. Berners-Lee's web vision was based on hypertext documents. Hypertext is a nonlinear way of handling text so that words are linked and/or associated with each other (hyperlinked), not by their position in an article or by chronological or other order, but by a system of pointers. Berners-Lee introduced a number of the key features of the Web today: URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).

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This site was created by Laura Parcell for the primary purpose of teaching and demonstrating computer skills.
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Laura Parcell, Computer Science/Business Education Teacher
Copyright © September, 2008. All rights reserved.