A brief History of Internet

The Internet may be a recent media phenomenon but as a concept it's actually older than most of its users. It was 1957, at the height of the Cold War. The Soviet had just launched the first Sputnik, thus beating the USA into space. In response, the US Department of Defence formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), that, twelve years later, led to ARPAnet - a project to develop a military research network to keep military units connected in case of atomic attack. In those days, no one had PCs. The computer world consisted of a computer linked to another to share the information. Over the next decade, research agencies and universities joined the network. In 1973 the network crossed the Atlantic to include the University College of London and Norway's Royal Radar Establishment. The 1970s also saw the introduction of electronic mail and what would become the Usenet newsgroups. The early 1980s saw the growth of TCP/IP, the Domain Name System, Network News Transfer Protocol and the European networks EUnet, MiniTel and JANET as well as the Japanese UNIX Network. ARPA evolved to handle the research traffic, while a second network, MILnet, took over the US military intelligence. In 1986 an important development took place, when the US National Science Foundation established NSFnet by linking five university super-computers at the speed of 56 Kbps. This opened the gateway for external universities to make use of superior processing power and to share resources. In the three years between 1984 and 1988, the number of host computers on the Internet (as it was now being called) grew from 1000 to over 60.000. NFSnet increased its capacity to 1544 Kbps. Over the next few years, more and more countries joined the network, from Australia and New Zealand, to Iceland, Israel, Brazil, India an Argentina. In 1989, CERN, the Swiss physics institute, proposed the basis of the World Wide Web to share research. By 1994, the web's traffic was 25 times greater, and domain names for commercial organisations (.com) began to outnumber those of educational institutions (.edu). As the web grew, so too did the global village. Almost every country in the world joined the Net. Even the White House was online. Today, reports say that the Earth will be home to more than 300 million Internet users in the next few years.