The Interesting History of the Internet

The Internet that we know today contains hundreds of thousands of websites and endless information on basically anything. Today, the Internet has social media sites, informational sites, news sites, video game sites, shopping sites, and plenty more. However, the Internet wasn't like this when it was first created. Many people believe the Internet didn't exist until it was given to the public in the 90s and then the World Wide Web was soon introduced around '95. In reality, the Internet was actually created in the 1960s and it had a different purpose.

During the 1960s, tensions between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were at the highest it's been during the Cold War. Events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Space Race are well-known events that happened during the 60s. In the early 1960s, MIT's J.C.R. Licklider, an American psychologist & computer scientist, proposed an idea of a "Galactic Network" of computers. He believed that this idea could act as an alternative way of communication between government leaders if the Soviets decided to destroy the telephone system. By the late 60s, the first workable prototype of the Internet would be invented with the creation of ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which were both funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Picture of ARPAnet in the 1970s

In 1969, ARPAnet, the government's computer network, would send the first message from a computer at UCLA to another computer located at Stanford. At the time, computers were so big that they would take up as much space as a small house would. The first message became a spectacular failure. The message sent was the word, "LOGIN", but ARPAnet's servers crashed and the Stanford computer would only receive the first two letters of the word.

In 1983, ARPAnet would then adopt TCP/IP or the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, which was invented by a computer scientist, Vinton Cerf. This invention would help form the "network of networks", which would become an integral part of the Internet. The TCP/IP was best described as a "virtual handshake" that would help introduce one computer to the other.

The Internet would only be used for government communications until 1990, where a computer scientist and engineer named Tim-Berners Lee would use the Internet as the foundation of the World Wide Web. This is what we know as the Internet today. By 1992, the Internet would then be open to the public and used for commercial purposes. This decision would change the lives of millions of people for almost the next three decades.

Today, 4.3 billion people around the world use the Internet on almost a daily basis. It is crazy to think about how this type of technology has forever changed the lives of billions of people in just fifty years. It's amazing to see how the Internet once was seen as an obscure research idea to a revolutionary technology that is imperative to have within the digital world of the 21st century.

Sources:
https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/invention-of-the-internet
https://www.history.com/news/who-invented-the-internet