When was internet built

The Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred the U. Defense Department to consider ways information could still be disseminated even after a nuclear attack. In response to this, other networks were created to provide information sharing.

January 1, is considered the official birthday of the Internet. He subsequently landed a series of jobs at different companies as a programmer, but none of them lasted long. He worked on a program to help nuclear scientists share data over another nascent system. It was an information system that used an older software known as Hypertext to link to data and documents over the Internet.

There were other information systems at the time. What made the Web powerful, and ultimately dominant, however, would also one day prove to be its greatest vulnerability: Berners-Lee gave it away for free; anyone with a computer and an Internet connection could not only access it but also build off it. Berners-Lee understood that the Web needed to be unfettered by patents, fees, royalties, or any other controls in order to thrive.

This way, millions of innovators could design their own products to take advantage of it. And, of course, millions did. Computer scientists and academics picked it up first, building applications that then drew others. In the beginning it was truly open, free, controlled by no one company or group.

The individual was incredibly empowered. We, collectively, by the billions, gave it away with every signed user agreement and intimate moment shared with technology. Facebook, Google, and Amazon now monopolize almost everything that happens online, from what we buy to the news we read to who we like. Along with a handful of powerful government agencies, they are able to monitor, manipulate, and spy in once unimaginable ways. Shortly after the election, Berners-Lee felt something had to change, and began methodically attempting to hack his creation.

As billions more connect to the Web, he feels an increasing urgency to resolve its problems. For him this is about not just those already online but also the billions still unconnected. How much weaker and more marginalized will they become as the rest of the world leaves them behind? We were now talking in a small, non-descript conference room, but Berners-Lee nevertheless felt called to action. Talking about this milestone, he grabbed a notebook and pen and started scribbling, slashing lines and dots and arrows across the page.

He was mapping out a social graph of the computing power of the world. When about a fifth of the page was covered with lines and dots and scribbles, Berners-Lee stopped. To fill it up so all of humanity has total power on the Web.

Looking back, the strategy of incorporating Internet protocols into a supported operating system for the research community was one of the key elements in the successful widespread adoption of the Internet. This enabled defense to begin sharing in the DARPA Internet technology base and led directly to the eventual partitioning of the military and non- military communities. Thus, by , Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications.

Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications between people.

At the same time that the Internet technology was being experimentally validated and widely used amongst a subset of computer science researchers, other networks and networking technologies were being pursued. The usefulness of computer networking — especially electronic mail — demonstrated by DARPA and Department of Defense contractors on the ARPANET was not lost on other communities and disciplines, so that by the mids computer networks had begun to spring up wherever funding could be found for the purpose.

The U. NSFNET programs to explicitly announce their intent to serve the entire higher education community, regardless of discipline. Indeed, a condition for a U. When Steve Wolff took over the NSFNET program in , he recognized the need for a wide area networking infrastructure to support the general academic and research community, along with the need to develop a strategy for establishing such infrastructure on a basis ultimately independent of direct federal funding.

Policies and strategies were adopted see below to achieve that end. It had seen the Internet grow to over 50, networks on all seven continents and outer space, with approximately 29, networks in the United States.

A key to the rapid growth of the Internet has been the free and open access to the basic documents, especially the specifications of the protocols. The beginnings of the ARPANET and the Internet in the university research community promoted the academic tradition of open publication of ideas and results. However, the normal cycle of traditional academic publication was too formal and too slow for the dynamic exchange of ideas essential to creating networks.

In a key step was taken by S. These memos were intended to be an informal fast distribution way to share ideas with other network researchers. At first the RFCs were printed on paper and distributed via snail mail. Jon Postel acted as RFC Editor as well as managing the centralized administration of required protocol number assignments, roles that he continued to play until his death, October 16, When some consensus or a least a consistent set of ideas had come together a specification document would be prepared.

Such a specification would then be used as the base for implementations by the various research teams. The open access to the RFCs for free, if you have any kind of a connection to the Internet promotes the growth of the Internet because it allows the actual specifications to be used for examples in college classes and by entrepreneurs developing new systems. Email has been a significant factor in all areas of the Internet, and that is certainly true in the development of protocol specifications, technical standards, and Internet engineering.

The very early RFCs often presented a set of ideas developed by the researchers at one location to the rest of the community.

After email came into use, the authorship pattern changed — RFCs were presented by joint authors with common view independent of their locations. The use of specialized email mailing lists has been long used in the development of protocol specifications, and continues to be an important tool. The IETF now has in excess of 75 working groups, each working on a different aspect of Internet engineering. Each of these working groups has a mailing list to discuss one or more draft documents under development.

When consensus is reached on a draft document it may be distributed as an RFC. This unique method for evolving new capabilities in the network will continue to be critical to future evolution of the Internet. The Internet is as much a collection of communities as a collection of technologies, and its success is largely attributable to both satisfying basic community needs as well as utilizing the community in an effective way to push the infrastructure forward.

The early ARPANET researchers worked as a close-knit community to accomplish the initial demonstrations of packet switching technology described earlier. Likewise, the Packet Satellite, Packet Radio and several other DARPA computer science research programs were multi-contractor collaborative activities that heavily used whatever available mechanisms there were to coordinate their efforts, starting with electronic mail and adding file sharing, remote access, and eventually World Wide Web capabilities.

In the late s, recognizing that the growth of the Internet was accompanied by a growth in the size of the interested research community and therefore an increased need for coordination mechanisms, Vint Cerf, then manager of the Internet Program at DARPA, formed several coordination bodies — an International Cooperation Board ICB , chaired by Peter Kirstein of UCL, to coordinate activities with some cooperating European countries centered on Packet Satellite research, an Internet Research Group which was an inclusive group providing an environment for general exchange of information, and an Internet Configuration Control Board ICCB , chaired by Clark.

In , when Barry Leiner took over management of the Internet research program at DARPA, he and Clark recognized that the continuing growth of the Internet community demanded a restructuring of the coordination mechanisms. The ICCB was disbanded and in its place a structure of Task Forces was formed, each focused on a particular area of the technology e. It of course was only a coincidence that the chairs of the Task Forces were the same people as the members of the old ICCB, and Dave Clark continued to act as chair.

This growth was complemented by a major expansion in the community. In addition to NSFNet and the various US and international government-funded activities, interest in the commercial sector was beginning to grow. As a result, the IAB was left without a primary sponsor and increasingly assumed the mantle of leadership.

The growth in the commercial sector brought with it increased concern regarding the standards process itself. Increased attention was paid to making the process open and fair.

In , yet another reorganization took place. In , the Internet Activities Board was re-organized and re-named the Internet Architecture Board operating under the auspices of the Internet Society. The recent development and widespread deployment of the World Wide Web has brought with it a new community, as many of the people working on the WWW have not thought of themselves as primarily network researchers and developers. Thus, through the over two decades of Internet activity, we have seen a steady evolution of organizational structures designed to support and facilitate an ever-increasing community working collaboratively on Internet issues.

Commercialization of the Internet involved not only the development of competitive, private network services, but also the development of commercial products implementing the Internet technology. Unfortunately they lacked both real information about how the technology was supposed to work and how the customers planned on using this approach to networking. The speakers came mostly from the DARPA research community who had both developed these protocols and used them in day-to-day work.

About vendor personnel came to listen to 50 inventors and experimenters. The results were surprises on both sides: the vendors were amazed to find that the inventors were so open about the way things worked and what still did not work and the inventors were pleased to listen to new problems they had not considered, but were being discovered by the vendors in the field.

Thus a two-way discussion was formed that has lasted for over a decade. In September of the first Interop trade show was born. It did. The Interop trade show has grown immensely since then and today it is held in 7 locations around the world each year to an audience of over , people who come to learn which products work with each other in a seamless manner, learn about the latest products, and discuss the latest technology.

Starting with a few hundred attendees mostly from academia and paid for by the government, these meetings now often exceed a thousand attendees, mostly from the vendor community and paid for by the attendees themselves.

The reason it is so useful is that it is composed of all stakeholders: researchers, end users and vendors. Network management provides an example of the interplay between the research and commercial communities. Cloud computing is having a big impact for businesses too. In the s, companies wanting to create a website needed to purchase and operate their own servers. But in , Amazon.

That has lowered the barrier to entry for creating websites and made it much easier for sites to quickly expand capacity as they grow more popular. A packet is the basic unit of information transmitted over the internet. A packet has two parts. The header contains information that helps the packet get to its destination, including the length of the packet, its source and destination, and a checksum value that helps the recipient detect if a packet was damaged in transit.

After the header comes the actual data. A packet can contain up to 64 kilobytes of data, which is roughly 20 pages of plain text. If internet routers experience congestion or other technical problems, they are allowed to deal with it by simply discarding packets.

The World Wide Web is a popular way to publish information on the internet. It offered a more powerful and user-friendly interface than other internet applications. The web supported hyperlinks, allowing users to browse from one document to another with a single click.

Over time, the web became increasingly sophisticated, supporting images, audio, video, and interactive content. In the mids, companies such as Yahoo and Amazon. In the s, full-featured web-based applications such as Yahoo Maps and Google Docs were created.

In practice, the organizations with the most influence over the web are Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla, the companies that produce the leading web browsers. Any technologies adopted by these four become de facto web standards.

The web has become so popular that many people now regard it as synonymous with the internet itself. But technically, the web is just one of many internet applications. Other applications include email and BitTorrent.

A web browser is a computer program that allows users to download and view websites. Web browsers are available for desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones. The first widely used browser was Mosaic , created by researchers at the University of Illinois. The Mosaic team moved to California to found Netscape , which built the first commercially successful web browser in Apple released its Safari browser in , and Google released a browser called Chrome in By , Chrome had grown to be the most popular web browser with a market share around 50 percent.

Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari also had significant market share. SSL, short for Secure Sockets Layer, is a family of encryption technologies that allows web users to protect the privacy of information they transmit over the internet. When you visit a secure website such as Gmail. Here's what that looks like in Google's Chrome browser:. That lock is supposed to signal that third parties won't be able to read any information you send or receive.

Under the hood, SSL accomplishes that by transforming your data into a coded message that only the recipient knows how to decipher. If a malicious party is listening to the conversation, it will only see a seemingly random string of characters, not the contents of your emails, Facebook posts, credit card numbers, or other private information.

SSL was introduced by Netscape in In its early years, it was only used on a few types of websites, such as online banking sites. More recently, there has been a movement toward making the use of SSL universal. In , Mozilla announced that future versions of the Firefox browser would treat the lack of SSL encryption as a security flaw, as a way to encourage all websites to upgrade. Google is considering taking the same step with Chrome.

The system is hierarchical.