The Internet is the worldwide,
publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks
that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet
Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists
of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government
networks, which together carry various information and services,
such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked
Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.
Creation of the Internet :
The USSR's launch of Sputnik spurred
the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA, later known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
or DARPA) in February 1958 to regain a technological lead. ARPA
created the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) to further
the research of the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program,
which had networked country-wide radar systems together for the
first time. J. C. R. Licklider was selected to head the IPTO, and
saw universal networking as a potential unifying human revolution.
In 1950, Licklider moved from the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at
Harvard University to MIT where he served on a committee that established
MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He worked on the SAGE project. In 1957 he
became a Vice President at BBN, where he bought the first production
PDP-1 computer and conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing.
Licklider recruited Lawrence Roberts to head a project to implement
a network, and Roberts based the technology on the work of Paul
Baran who had written an exhaustive study for the U.S. Air Force
that recommended packet switching (as opposed to Circuit switching)
to make a network highly robust and survivable. After much work,
the first node went live at UCLA on October 29, 1969 on what would
be called the ARPANET, one of the "eve" networks of today's
Internet. Following on from this, the British Post Office, Western
Union International and Tymnet collaborated to create the first
international packet switched network, referred to as the International
Packet Switched Service (IPSS), in 1978. This network grew from
Europe and the US to cover Canada, Hong Kong and Australia by 1981.
The first TCP/IP wide area network was operational by 1 January
1983, when the United States' National Science Foundation (NSF)
constructed a university network backbone that would later become
the NSFNet. (This date is held by some to be technically that of
the birth of the Internet.) It was then followed by the opening
of the network to commercial interests in 1985. Important, separate
networks that offered gateways into, then later merged with, the
NSFNet include Usenet, BITNET and the various commercial and educational
X.25 Compuserve and JANET. Telenet (later called Sprintnet), was
a large privately-funded national computer network with free dialup
access in cities throughout the U.S. that had been in operation
since the 1970s. This network eventually merged with the others
in the 1990s as the TCP/IP protocol became increasingly popular.
The ability of TCP/IP to work over these pre-existing communication
networks, especially the international X.25 IPSS network, allowed
for a great ease of growth. Use of the term "Internet"
to describe a single global TCP/IP network originated around this
time.
The network gained a public face in the 1990s. On August 6, 1991
CERN, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland
publicized the new World Wide Web project, two years after Tim Berners-Lee
had begun creating HTML, HTTP and the first few Web pages at CERN.
An early popular Web browser was ViolaWWW based upon HyperCard.
It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic Web Browser.
In 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released version 1.0
of Mosaic and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in
the previously academic/technical Internet. By 1996 the word "Internet"
was coming into common daily usage, frequently misused to refer
to the World Wide Web.
Meanwhile, over the course of the decade, the Internet successfully
accommodated the majority of previously existing public computer
networks (although some networks such as FidoNet have remained separate).
This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration,
which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary
open nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability
and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over
the network.
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