The history of the internet

From today’s perspective it’s hard to imagine a world without the internet. The modern internet is not much more than 30 years old, and its most public face, the World Wide Web (WWW), has only existed for half that time.

Its influence has been startling; it has created new industries, communities, categories of information, and ways for people around the world to interconnect and collaborate. It has changed the political landscape and introduced new concerns about censorship, intellectual property rights, and the control of the infrastructure.

It’s important to distinguish between the internet and the applications running on it. The internet is a web of networks that enables these networks and linking devices of any type using any medium to interconnect in a standard way using a single communications protocol.

Every connected device is equal in status, and can communicate with other connected devices to exchange data. This can be in any form from text to video, as long as the software at each end understands the format once it arrives. That software determines how the internet looks to users, and the services it can carry.

The internet is like the telephone system, and applications, such as the WWW, are the conversations carried over the wires. Like the phone system, the internet does not care what data it carries; it has no interest in what the conversations say, but only ensures that they can take place quickly and without errors.

Today we have an internet infrastructure that has coped with each new type of network connected to it and each new form of traffic that application developers have dreamed up.

Every new technology device is expected to have some form of internet connectivity built in, and even old devices such as fridges are being retrofitted for the new connected world.

New applications assuming continuous and reliable internet connections arrive daily, and more than a billion users worldwide are ready to take advantage of them. So how have we reached this point, and how will the internet develop in the future to cope with ever-increasing demands?

IMPs and DAemons
The crucial initial date for the internet is 4 October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first Sputnik satellite and convinced the military and political establishments in the US that research and development needed more focus.

President Eisenhower established and funded the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) in 1958, with the aim of drawing together control of all the advanced military research projects and preventing in-fighting between different branches of the military.

However, as Arpa evolved over the next few years, its interests broadened. One research area was command and control, where human-computer interaction was becoming more significant as time-sharing computer systems began to spread in military installations.

In 1962 a specialist in such interaction, JCR Licklider, took over the control division. He believed strongly in time-sharing interactive systems, and began to fund computer research in universities as well as inside equipment manufacturers; this included investment in Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering lab at Stanford, which eventually developed the mouse.

Under Licklider and his successors, Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor, Arpa funded every significant development in interactive computing. This included networking, with the aim of connecting the incompatible systems at various Arpa sites and allowing researchers to share processing power and data.