Introduction
- A Brief History of the Internet
It seems as
if the Internet arrived out of nowhere in the early
1990s, but in fact the Net had been around in one form
or another for decades.
The
Internet grew out of a 1969 research project by the
US Government’s Advanced Research Project Agency
(ARPA). At the time the demand for access to computers
was growing at an incredible rate, far beyond what could
be funded. So it made sense to try connecting sites
together so that people working at locations around
the country could work on shared resources. Although
the concept was proved to work in an incredibly short
space of time, (the first four sites were linked together
within a year) things took a lot longer to grow significantly.
By 1980 there were only 15 universities connected to
the ARPA network. This was partly due to cost and partly
due to restrictions on what institutions could join
this military funded network.
The US National
Science Foundation (NSF) started to fund a separate
network, built upon similar principals to the ARPA network
but providing a variety of connection options at a variety
of prices. Without ARPAs military links this Computer
Science Network, and its successor (NSFNET), were able
to connect universities across the USA. Similar academic
networks were set up across the world (such as the UK’s
Joint Academic NETwork, or JANET for short) with links
between these networks starting to spring up. As these
networks grew and became interconnected, this ‘network
of networks’ became known as the Internet.
It’s worth emphasising that the
Internet isn’t a single entity, there isn’t
a company that owns the Internet. It’s really
just a collection of computer networks that are linked
together, allowing information to be passed from one
to another.
|
