A Brief History of the Internet: From ARPANET to the early 2000s
The Internet’s genesis can be traced back to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), conceived in 1966. The aim was to connect large academic computers together, thus facilitating swift and efficient information exchange.
[This post is based on content from a lesson within Udacity’s free Computer Networking course. Check it out!]
Disclaimer: This post was written with ChatGPT.
The first operational ARPANET nodes came online in 1969 at UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and Utah. At the same time, across the pond, the National Physical Laboratory in the UK developed their network, marking another crucial step towards the creation of the Internet. By 1971, approximately 20 ARPANET nodes were active, utilizing a host-to-host protocol, and featured two cross-country links all running at a humble 50 kbps.
In its infancy, the ARPANET resembled a sketch by Larry Roberts, with the four original nodes and other significant entities such as Berkley, MIT’s MAC project, BBN, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Michigan, Illinois, Dartmouth, Stanford, among others. The ARPANET of the late 1960s and June 1974 showcased significant growth with more networks and university-connected machines coming online.
However, ARPANET was not the sole player in the networking game. SatNet, which operated over satellite, packet radio networks, and Ethernet local area networks were also contributing to the evolution of the Internet.
Work commenced in 1973 to replace the original network control protocol with TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). The standardization of TCP/IP took place from 1978 to 1981 and was included in Berkeley UNIX in 1981. Subsequently, on January 1st, 1983, the Internet witnessed one of its landmark “flag days” with ARPANET’s transition to TCP/IP.
Although the Internet continued to grow steadily, it wasn’t until the mid-90s that the number of computers on the Internet skyrocketed. Around August 1995, there were about 10 million hosts on the Internet. By 2000, this number had grown tenfold, reaching over 100 million.
The Internet experienced several pivotal technical milestones during this growth period:
- In 1982, the Domain Name System was rolled out, replacing the hosts.txt file containing all the world’s machine names with a distributed name lookup system.
- The year 1988 witnessed the deployment of TCP congestion control in response to a series of congestion collapses.
- In 1989, the NSFNET saw the introduction of BGP inter-domain routing, which included support for routing policy.
The 1990s brought a slew of new applications that further defined the Internet landscape:
- Streaming media, including audio and video, started appearing around 1992.
- In 1993, the advent of the World Wide Web allowed users to browse a mesh of hyperlinks, transforming the Internet experience.
- The first major search engine, Alta Vista, came online in December 1995.
- The dawn of the new millennium saw the emergence of peer-to-peer protocols and applications, including file sharing.
From the ARPANET of 1966 to the Internet of today, the journey is one of constant evolution and progress. It serves as a testament to human ingenuity and the limitless possibilities that arise when we harness the power of interconnectedness.
