Where It All Started: The History Of The Internet
Posted by Damian Papworth | Under computers Thursday Feb 11, 2010What initiated the development of the Internet in the first place was the need of universities to share information between their researchers and the fear of the military that a major attack will destroy their computer networks controlling satellites and other types of weapons. The history of the internet is closely linked to 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, quite primitive, networks were solely for the use of computer experts and scientists. It was not accessible to the man in the street, but only to staff members at the universities and selected advanced students. The whole idea centered around file sharing.
One of these file sharing services was called FTP, which stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is still widely used on the Internet at this very moment. If you have a website, for example, you would use an FTP program to transfer the files from your personal computer to the web server.
The development at the universities during the 1980s and 1990s were mainly concerned with the development of a menu system, so anyone could easily get a list of the available files and then make a choice by either typing in the file name or selecting it.
A huge step in the right direction was when the scientists at the European Laboratory for Partical Physics (located in Switzerland, in short called CERN) developed the basic principles of what we call http today during 1991. Hypertext transfer protocol is in layman’s terms the ability to create links in a page of information so anyone clicking on that link will be taken to that other page. This is still what makes the web work today.
The next major step ahead was when the web browser was introduced during 1993. The first generally available browser was called Mosaic. Suddenly anyone could log on to the ‘Net and access vast numbers of files simply by clicking on the hyperlinks embedded in a file. You could now also type in a domain name in the address bar, for example that of your university, and go to all the files they wanted to share with the word in a few seconds. Soon after Mosaic, Netscape introduced their Navigator and Microsoft followed soon afterwards with Internet Explorer.
Initially the web was for non-commercial use only, but during the ‘nineties commercial networks started to proliferate. These companies offered services like email and web browsing, suddenly putting users from all over the world in contact with each other. The history of the Internet is still being written every day, as new developments like browser add-on continue to change the environment in which we surf the web.
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