Where did the internet come from? — Brightside
Where did the internet come from?
It’s changed the world, but how was the internet created? Find out here.
The internet began life in 1969, when scientists working for the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now known as DARPA) connected computer networks at the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute. The system supposedly crashed when the team in California typed the G of “login”, but the technology had been proven and the network began to grow.
ARPANET, as it was known, was soon extended by technology like email. Email was developed in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, and was so useful that by 1973 it made up three quarters of the traffic on the network. By this time, there were 40 individual networks connected to ARPANET. The first connection across the Atlantic Ocean also happened in 1973, when University College London was connected.
Around this time, other networks similar to ARPANET were being created in other countries. A system was developed to connect these networks together: this system is known as TCP/IP, and is still used today. The word “internet” refers to this process of connecting networks together to form a bigger network : “inter-“ means “between”, and “net” is short for “network”.
The early internet would be unrecognisable to most people today: there was no such thing as a website, and almost all communication was text-only. The online world we are more familiar with came a step closer in 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee proposed the “World Wide Web”, in which “hypertext” documents would be linked together for users to browse. The first web page was published in 1991, and the idea grew into the web we know today.
In 1990, the first publically-available ISP (Internet Service Provider) started, and internet access became a possibility for the general public. 1993 saw the first popular web browser, Mosaic, and websites for the US government and the United Nations. In 1996, Hotmail was launched as the first web-based email service, and in 1998 Google went live. The web we know today was beginning to take shape.
More internet history facts
The first webcam was created in 1991 at the Cambridge University Computer Science Department to let researchers see if their coffee pot was full without having to go and check.
The first ebook was the American Declaration of Independence, typed up by hand and posted on the internet in 1971. This was the start of Project Gutenberg, which now offers over 34,000 free ebooks.
Spam is older than the World Wide Web: the first spam email was sent in 1978.
The first computer virus, created in 1988, wasn’t meant to harm the machines it infected: its creator wanted to use it to measure the size of the internet, but a programming error meant it could make infected machines unusable. It is estimated to have caused $10–100 million worth of damage.