The origins of the internet
The origins of the internet are rooted in the USA of the 1950s. The Cold War was at its height and huge tensions existed between North America and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers were in possession of deadly nuclear weapons, and people lived in fear of long-range surprise attacks.
At this time, computers were large, expensive machines exclusively used by military scientists and university staff.
What is the Internet?
This question may seem easy to answer to the young generations, who have grown under its influence, but defining it isn’t really as easy. Internet is also known as the World Wide Web (www) is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use a protocol called the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to link to billions of devices all around the world. This carries a vast range of information, from the top-secret military and research files to the most trending and viral video of the week.
The first use of a computer network
In 1965, Lawrence Roberts made two separate computers in different places ‘talk’ to each other for the first time. This experimental link used a telephone line with an acoustically coupled modem, and transferred digital data using packets.
When the first packet-switching network was developed, Leonard Kleinrock was the first person to use it to send a message. He used a computer at UCLA to send a message to a computer at Stanford. Kleinrock tried to type ‘login’ but the system crashed after the letters ‘L’ and ‘O’ had appeared on the Stanford monitor.
The ARPANET was born.
Father of the Internet: Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee was the man, who led the development of the World Wide Web, the defining of HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), HTML (hypertext markup language) used to create web pages, and URLs (Universal Resource Locators). The development of WWW, HTTP, HTML and URLs took place between 1989 and 1991. Tim Berners-Lee was born in London and he graduated in Physics from Oxford University in 1976. Currently, Tim Berners-Lee is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium. The group that sets technical standards for the web.
After being out for 10 years from high school. He began co-designing and co-developing the protocols and structure of what became the internet.
