Where It All Started: The History Of The Internet
The Internet started from humble beginnings: the need of universities to exchange files between their staff members and students more easily. The military also had a role in the sense that they wanted to decentralize their computer systems so it couldn’t all be wiped out by a single attack. The history of this research is to an extent the history of the internet
The development was initially driven by the universities. They started to develop protocols to make it easier to exchange information more readily between their computer systems. The military soon realized the potential of all this and started taking part in the research.
These initial primitive networks were only used by computer geeks and scientists. It was not open to the general public, but only to members of the particular university’s staff or students that were give specific access. The whole concept evolved around file sharing.
One such file sharing service was called FTP (File Transfer Protocol). It has been used for a couple of decades now and is still in use today. If you have your own website it’s highly likely you have also used FTP to upload your website files to the server of your hosting company.
The universities spent many thousands of hours on research during the ‘eighties and ‘nineties to work on a menu system, so anyone logging on to the network could easily get a list of available files they can access by typing the name of the file or selecting its name.
A major step forward was when the researchers at the European Laboratory for particle physics (popularly called CERN) developed the hypertext protocol, which enabled users to embed links in a page and enabled anyone to access the relevant document by simply clicking on the link. It was what lead to the creation of the World Wide Web in 1991 and is in fact the principle that still drives the web today.
Soon after that another major development took place that changed the web forever. During 1993 the first web browser appeared on the scene. It was called Mosaic, and suddenly anyone could easily browse huge lists of files and navigate between those files simply by following the links embedded in each file.
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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