A Brief History of the Internet

In 2015 it is hard to imagine a world without the internet – in fact the thought is just unbearable. At the risk of showing my age, I remember when household connections first became available through the medium of the painfully slow and obnoxious dial-up system.

Nowadays, the whole world is connected and so much of our life experience is carried out online. From business to social networking and from shopping to gaming, there is almost no aspect of life that does not have some online component to it.

Some apocalyptic event notwithstanding, it seems like the internet is here to stay and is likely to only become more and more ingrained into our everyday lives. From our home and work computers to smartphones, tablets and wearable devices, the internet seems destined to remain an integral part of human life and evolution.

With that in mind it seemed like a good point in time to sort through the annals of the past and present to you a brief history of the internet.

In the Beginning

A global network of computers was first proposed in 1962 by MIT psychologist and computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider, who saw potential in a system that would allow computers used in scientific and military fields to share information with one another. He then left MIT and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) to develop the idea. The concept of packet-switching which would form the basis of internet connectivity was developed by MIT/UCLA theorist Leonard Kleinrock.

Lawrence Roberts of MIT managed to use dial-up telephone lines, to connect a computer in Massachusetts to one in California and thus demonstrating the possibility of long distance networking for the first time. However, one thing that was clear is that circuit switching through the telephone line was hopelessly inadequate and Kleinrocks’s theory of packet switching was confirmed.

The ARPANET as it was then know first went online in December of 1969, and connected four computers in UCLA, The Stanford Research Institute, UCSB and the University of Utah respectively. By the summer of 1970, another four were added, with a further four in place by 1971. From there the number of computers connected to the ARPANET grew exponentially until there were too many to possibly list here.

The early internet was not the user-friendly browser based system that we enjoy these days. It was designed to be used by computer experts, engineers, scientists and the like, and was thus incredibly complex to operate and required much mastery of difficult systems. Don’t forget that PCs were still a way off at this point. Routers existed though and were designed to divert traffic if one of the major sites went down.

You’ve Got Mail

Email was first devolved in 1972 by Ray Tomlinson of BBN. He was the one who selected the @ symbol to link a user’s username and address. The telnet protocol, which enabled users to log on to a computer remotely, was also published in 1972 and was followed by ftp in 1973. Ftp was significant as it enabled file transfers between computers and made Request for Comments (RFC) available to anyone that had use of it.

The concept of internet communities began with the introduction of Newsgroups in 1979. Newsgroups took advantage of Bell Labs’ Unix to Unix copy protocol and allowed discussion groups that focused on a topic. These were the beginnings of the first forums. In 1981 BITNET connected IBM mainframes around the world and used it to provide mail services. This formed another facet of the beginnings of internet communities as it allowed emails to be exchanged and discussion lists to be developed.

User Unfriendly

Over the next decade internet related commands became standardized, which allowed for easier use of the systems. Whilst still not simple by today’s standards, it did allow more people, particularly in educational institutions, to use the available services, limited as they were.

In 1991, a simple menu system was developed at the University of Minnesota, which represented the first attempt at a friendly user-interface. 1991 also saw the development of a protocol that used hypertext – a system of embedding links in text that linked to other text. This protocol would eventually become known as the World Wide Web.

Mosaic was developed in 1993 by Marc Andreessen and his team at the NCSA, which was the first graphical internet browser that the world had seen. Later Andreessen, became the driving force behind Netscape, and dominated the world of browsers and servers until Microsoft decided to join the fray with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Delphi was the first company that offered a subscription based internet service. Email connection became available in July 1992, with full internet access following in November. In 1995, it was joined by AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe.

This represented a period of enormous growth for the industry. Initially many services were free and used advertising to shift costs away from the consumer. Online sales of consumer goods increased and the term “online security” became a thing. Yes, the scammers were already out in force and taking advantage of this new frontier of trickery.

Perhaps the most significant exemplar of the growth of the industry at this point is AOL’s acquisition of Time-Warner, which was the largest merger in history at the time.

Back to the Future

And that brings us right up to date. High-speed connections are the order of the day these days, able to handle massive data exchanges allowing for multimedia streaming at higher quality than ever before and lightning fast downloads. Wireless access has also seen rapid growth over the last few years, with universal wireless being the next big thing, which will basically turn the world into one big hotspot.

So, from its humble and esoteric beginnings, the internet has come a long way to reach the state we see now. Do you remember the first time you went online and do you remember what you used it for (keep it clean please)? Please let us know.

Have fun.

Kerry Butters

Kerry is a published author and writer on all things tech, corporate tech, data centres, SEO, webdesign & more for some of the world’s leading sites.