internet history assignment

Browse Course Material

Course info, instructors.

• Prof. Hari Balakrishnan
• Prof. George Verghese

Departments

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

As Taught In

• Computer Networks
• Digital Systems
• Signal Processing
• Telecommunications

Learning Resource Types

Introduction to eecs ii: digital communication systems, lecture 23: a brief history of the internet.

Description: This lecture offers a historical account of the development of the Internet and Internet Protocol (IP). The ideal case for area networking is presented, followed by the creation of the domain name system (DNS).

Instructor: Hari Balakrishnan

• Download video
• Download transcript

You are leaving MIT OpenCourseWare

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

The Invention of the Internet

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 28, 2019 | Original: July 30, 2010

Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the internet has no single “inventor.” Instead, it has evolved over time. The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and share data with one another. Today, we use the internet for almost everything, and for many people it would be impossible to imagine life without it.

The Sputnik Scare

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first manmade satellite into orbit. The satellite, known as Sputnik, did not do much: It relayed blips and bleeps from its radio transmitters as it circled the Earth. Still, to many Americans, the beach-ball-sized Sputnik was proof of something alarming: While the brightest scientists and engineers in the United States had been designing bigger cars and better television sets, it seemed, the Soviets had been focusing on less frivolous things—and they were going to win the Cold War because of it.

Did you know? Today, almost one-third of the world’s 6.8 billion people use the internet regularly.

After Sputnik’s launch, many Americans began to think more seriously about science and technology. Schools added courses on subjects like chemistry, physics and calculus. Corporations took government grants and invested them in scientific research and development. And the federal government itself formed new agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age technologies such as rockets, weapons and computers.

The Birth of the ARPAnet

Scientists and military experts were especially concerned about what might happen in the event of a Soviet attack on the nation’s telephone system. Just one missile, they feared, could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible. 

In 1962, a scientist from M.I.T. and ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider proposed a solution to this problem: a “galactic network” of computers that could talk to one another. Such a network would enable government leaders to communicate even if the Soviets destroyed the telephone system.

In 1965, another M.I.T. scientist developed a way of sending information from one computer to another that he called “packet switching.” Packet switching breaks data down into blocks, or packets, before sending it to its destination. That way, each packet can take its own route from place to place. Without packet switching, the government’s computer network—now known as the ARPAnet—would have been just as vulnerable to enemy attacks as the phone system.

On October 29, 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first message: a “node-to-node” communication from one computer to another. (The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one was the size of a small house.) The message—“LOGIN”—was short and simple, but it crashed the fledgling ARPA network anyway: The Stanford computer only received the note’s first two letters.

The Network Grows

By the end of 1969, just four computers were connected to the ARPAnet, but the network grew steadily during the 1970s. 

In 1971, it added the University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet, and two years later it added networks at London’s University College and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. As packet-switched computer networks multiplied, however, it became more difficult for them to integrate into a single worldwide “internet.”

By the end of the 1970s, a computer scientist named Vinton Cerf had begun to solve this problem by developing a way for all of the computers on all of the world’s mini-networks to communicate with one another. He called his invention “Transmission Control Protocol,” or TCP. (Later, he added an additional protocol, known as “Internet Protocol.” The acronym we use to refer to these today is TCP/IP.) One writer describes Cerf’s protocol as “the ‘handshake’ that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space.”

The World Wide Web

Cerf’s protocol transformed the internet into a worldwide network. Throughout the 1980s, researchers and scientists used it to send files and data from one computer to another. However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Since then, the internet has changed in many ways. In 1992, a group of students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed a sophisticated browser that they called Mosaic. (It later became Netscape.) Mosaic offered a user-friendly way to search the Web: It allowed users to see words and pictures on the same page for the first time and to navigate using scrollbars and clickable links. 

That same year, Congress decided that the Web could be used for commercial purposes. As a result, companies of all kinds hurried to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use the internet to sell goods directly to customers. More recently, social networking sites like Facebook have become a popular way for people of all ages to stay connected.

HISTORY Vault: 101 Inventions That Changed the World

Take a closer look at the inventions that have transformed our lives far beyond our homes (the steam engine), our planet (the telescope) and our wildest dreams (the internet).

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

• Intro to ICT »

History Of The Internet ¶

Introduction ¶.

By definition the Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol . How did this technology come to be so popular and so widely used around the world? Was it always so large and extensive, filled with information about just about anything you can possibly imagine and accessible from almost anywhere, anytime? The answer is no and it is important to understand where it came from to understand how to utilize it to its fullest potential now.

The Internet’s origin have their roots in a military project, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program, which networked country-wide radar systems together for the first time. This was created around 1958 as part of an attempt to regain the lead in technology from the Soviet Union which had recently launched Sputnik.

SAGE Computer Room

J.C.R. Licklider was selected to head the committee which controlled the SAGE project. He envisioned universal networking as a unifying human revolution. Licklider recruited Lawrence Roberts to head a project which implemented a network. Roberts had worked with the U.S. Air Force on a packet switching system as opposed to a circuit switching system. On October 29, 1969, Licklider and Roberts interconnected the first two nodes between UCLA and SRI International at Menlo Park, California. This was the beginning of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) which was one of the key networks which our Internet today was based off of. Soon after the first international packet-switched network service was created between U.S. and U.K.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed the first description of TCP (covered more deeply in the Introduction to Networking lesson) in 1973. The term “Internet” was first used in 1974 to describe a single global TCP/IP network detailed in the first full specification of TCP written by Cerf and his colleagues. The first TCP/IP-wide area network was created on January 1, 1983 when all hosts on the ARPANET were switched over from the older protocols to TCP/IP.

In 1984, the National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioned the construction of a 1.5 megabit/second network which became known as NSFNET . In 1989 the US Federal Networking Council approved the interconnection of the NSFNET to the commercial MCI Mail system.

Soon after, other commercial e-mail services were connected such as OnTyme, Telemail, and CompuServe . Three Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were also created: UUNET , PSINET , and CERFNET . More and more seperate networks were created that eventually interconnected with this large, growing network of networks.

The ability of TCP/IP to work over virtually any pre-existing communication networks allowed for a great ease of growth, although the rapid growth of the Internet was due primarily to the availability of commercial routers from companies such as Cisco Systems , Proteon and Juniper , the availability of commercial Ethernet equipment for local-area networking and the widespread implementation of TCP/IP on the UNIX operating system.

Although the basic applications and guidelines that make the Internet possible had existed for almost a decade, the network did not gain public face until the 1990s. On August 6, 1991, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, (CERN) , which straddles the border between France and Switzerland, publicized the new World Wide Web project. The web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW. It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser. By 1996 usage of the word “Internet” had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its use as a reference to the World Wide Web. Over the course of the decade, the Internet successfully accommodated the majority of previously existing public computer networks (although some networks have remained seperate).

Today’s Internet ¶

Aside from the complex physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is facilitated by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contrracts and technical specifications or protocols that describe how to exchange data over the network. Indeed, the Internet has severely matured since its birth many years ago. Today almost 1.5 billion people use the Internet. That’s almost a quarter of the entire world (a lot of people).

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the authority that coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers on the Internet, including domain names, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and protocol port and parameter numbers. A globally unified namespace is essential for the Internet to function. Because the Internet is a distributed network comprising many volunatirly interconnected networks, the Internet, as such, has no governing body.

ICANN Headquarters

One of the most common uses people have for the Internet is the World Wide Web. Whenever you say you are “on the Internet” you are using the World Wide Web. When you are surfing the Internet through different pages you are moving through the World Wide Web. However, that is not the only use for the Internet. E-mail is another very popular use for the Internet. Internet e-mail may travel and be stored unencrypted on many other networks and machines out of both the sender’s and the recipient’s control. Remote access is another very common use for the Internet. The Internet allows computer users to connect to other computers and information stores easily, wherever they may be across the world. File sharing is also popular. It allows people to send files through e-mail, FTP, peer-to-peer networks, etc.

Exercises ¶

Worksheets ¶.

• Define Key Terms
• Create Timeline

References ¶

• Wikipedia - World Wide Web

Internet50 Highlights

On October 29, 1969 at UCLA, Professor Lenonard Kleinrock and his team sent the first message over a network of computers that would evolve into the internet. The world’s leading technology experts and visionaries gathered at UCLA on October 29, 2019 to honor the significance of this moment and discuss the current state and future aspirations of our connected world.

*Internet50 content is owned by UCLA Samueli School Of Engineering .

President Eisenhower Created the Advanced Research Project Agency

Speaker 1: Today, a new moon is in the sky. A 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.

Leonard Kleinrock: In 1957, Sputnik went up. It caused a great distress for this country. We were now behind the Soviets in technology. President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Project Agency.

Steven Lukasik: ARPA was created in 1958. The guiding principle was ARPA did things that no one else was doing. And therefore, it better do it.

Bob Taylor: And their first research programs were space programs because Sputnik had been a space program.

Steven Lukasik: The ARPA director got cross-wired with the President over whether ARPA should be the launcher of all satellites for the United States. People had thought we better not let too much of the space technology stay in Defense. So NASA was established.

Bob Taylor: And these space programs were transferred from ARPA to NASA which left ARPA with room to start research in other areas. And computer research was one of the areas they opened up.

Steve Crocker: ARPA as an agency is divided up into offices. Each office has a director and a handful of program managers and that was it. So an extremely lightweight, nearly flat structure. The Information Processing Techniques Office was where all of this funding for advanced computer science was coming from.

J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider: The thing that makes the computer communication network special is that it puts the workers, that would be the team members who are geographically distributed, in touch not only with one another but with the information base with which they work all the time.

Charles Herzfeld: Licklider came and gave a seminar at the Pentagon, even talked about the new way of computing. By that time, everybody had seen the ORD batch process. You give a program your problem, this goes away in programs and finally comes back with a stack of paper in which it is alleged that the answer is hidden. That’s a miserable way to do research, but Licklider said, “This is all wrong, you need direct interaction by the individual scientists and the real machine and you don’t have to be in the same institution at the same place. You can do it all by some magic distant medium which we call the net.”

Bob Taylor: A year or two later when ARPA had created this computer research program, they invited Lick to come and be its first director.

Leonard Kleinrock: Licklider basically became the head of the computer side of this research effort.

Charles Herzfeld: I think Licklider is the smartest man I’ve ever met.

Alan Kay: Because he wasn’t a technologist, because he hooked up to this big idea, he was a big… He was big. Lick was big. He had a vision as to what a network might do, give people connectivity and they’ll do some wonderful things. He had no idea how to do it.

Why Did You Pick October 29th, 1969?

JOHN MARKOFF: He left UC Berkeley after taking all of their computer science courses. So Charlie, why don’t we start with you? How did you end up running software for this machine?

CHARLIE KLEIN: Well, I had gone to UCLA as an undergrad and I’d already learned to do some programming from my dad so I ended up…

JOHN MARKOFF: Go ahead.

CHARLIE KLEIN: So I ended up having to take a programming class and went to the department chair and said, “Do I really need to take this?” And he said, “No, you don’t need to. Why don’t you work on my research project?” So I was working for Gerry Estrin on the research, and then, Len got this project to work on the ARPANET. And most of us switched over to Len’s project and I was working on trying to keep our computer system working and working on the operating system and then when the IMP came, I had to write some software to make it work.

JOHN MARKOFF: And you were building an operating system, mostly though, right? For something called the Sigma 7.

CHARLIE KLEIN: Right. Right.

JOHN MARKOFF: Okay. And how did you end up being on campus at 10:30 tonight, 50 years ago?

CHARLIE KLEIN: I enjoyed programming.

CHARLIE KLEIN: I sort of described it as when you got a programming working, it’s like moving up the next level in a video game. You got a little excitement. So I would often stay late at night, sometimes I stayed all night and programmed all night, then went to my classes in the morning.

JOHN MARKOFF: Okay, so the first connection that you had with Menlo Park was not seen as a big deal by you?

CHARLIE KLEIN: Not to me.

JOHN MARKOFF: And why did you pick October 29th 1969 to do it on?

CHARLIE KLEIN: I’m not sure there was any specific reason for that date, we were ready to try it, Bill was ready to try it and we started trying it.

JOHN MARKOFF: Bill, how did you come to be on the other end of that communication?

BILL DUVALL: How did I come to the…

JOHN MARKOFF: To be on the other end of that communication?

BILL DUVALL: Well, basically, I was working with, at SRI with Doug Engelbart and his group, and that’s where a lot of the paradigm that we see today on the internet came from the idea of using a computer, which up to that point, had been used for basically databases for bank and for numerical processing. The idea of using it as a page-oriented, with a mouse, information system, and in fact, that’s where the mouse… He invented the mouse as part of that whole effort. But part of the concept was that there would be basically a lot of workstations… He called them knowledge centers, basically, and these would all have these types of terminals and they’d be connected via network. And so, when the idea of the… And it was being funded by ARPA, so when the idea of a network came along, it was a very natural step to say, “We’ll be one of their first nodes.”

JOHN MARKOFF: You and Charlie hadn’t physically met?

BILL DUVALL: No, in fact, we never physically met for… Until I think 10 years ago or 15 years ago, so.

CHARLIE KLEIN: Yeah. [laughter]

JOHN MARKOFF: But you did regularly talk on the phone?

BILL DUVALL: We did talk on the phone. The whole… When the IMP was delivered, which was, I think the beginning of October at SRI, along with the IMP came a deadline and the deadline was October 31st to basically have a login from one computer to another over the ARPANET at that point. And so, we worked furiously to try and get all the software ready do that, and in order to get… We knew that everything was… There were a lot of things that we were putting together. It was a complicated system, a lot of pieces, and so we decided to start testing early and that’s why… It was October 29th, to see if we could beat the deadline, and so we scheduled a test for 29th, it was at 10 o’clock at night because there were other people that used the system during the day and we knew that it was fragile to say the least, this was pre-alpha stuff.

JOHN MARKOFF: But also, this wasn’t your primary job at the Augmentation Research Center, this was something you were sort of called into the last moment to do?

BILL DUVALL: That’s right, yeah. There was… A person had been contracted to do the interface and when the IMP was delivered, doing a review of the state of software was obvious that it wasn’t gonna get there and at that time, I was the only person in the group that both understood the protocols and could work in the SDS 940 Time-Sharing System. So I sort of, I was volunteered, let’s put it that way.

JOHN MARKOFF: So, this is the “Watson come here quick” moment of the internet and nobody really knew that that was the case for maybe a decade or two, is that right?

When the Idea of a Network – We’ll Be One of their First Nodes

08:11 JOHN MARKOFF: You and Charlie hadn’t physically met?

08:13 BILL DUVALL: No, in fact, we never physically met for… Until I think 10 years ago or 15 years ago, so.

08:19 CHARLEY KLINE: Yeah. [laughter]

08:20 JOHN MARKOFF: But you did regularly talk on the phone?

08:22 BILL DUVALL: We did talk on the phone. The whole… When the IMP was delivered, which was, I think the beginning of October at SRI, along with the IMP came a deadline and the deadline was October 31st to basically have a login from one computer to another over the ARPANET at that point. And so, we worked furiously to try and get all the software ready do that, and in order to get… We knew that everything was… There were a lot of things that we were putting together. It was a complicated system, a lot of pieces, and so we decided to start testing early and that’s why… It was October 29th, to see if we could beat the deadline, and so we scheduled a test for 29th, it was at 10 o’clock at night because there were other people that used the system during the day and we knew that it was fragile to say the least, this was pre-alpha stuff.

09:16 JOHN MARKOFF: But also, this wasn’t your primary job at the Augmentation Research Center, this was something you were sort of called into the last moment to do?

09:23 BILL DUVALL: That’s right, yeah. There was… A person had been contracted to do the interface and when the IMP was delivered, doing a review of the state of software was obvious that it wasn’t gonna get there and at that time, I was the only person in the group that both understood the protocols and could work in the SDS 940 Time-Sharing System. So I sort of, I was volunteered, let’s put it that way.

09:49 JOHN MARKOFF: So, this is the “Watson come here quick” moment of the internet and nobody really knew that that was the case for maybe a decade or two, is that right?

Request for Comment and the Basic Plan for the ARPANET

JOHN MARKOFF: Well, so then, let’s talk a little bit about how this came to be. Steve, there was this process called Request for Comment and I think that that… If you could explain that and how that came to be, ’cause that was really where the architecture for the system came from.

Steve Crocker: The basic plan for the ARPANET had been laid out by the adults, we were the kids. And so, the IMP was designed by Bolt Beranek and Newman, and the long lines, the telephones that were procured from AT&T. And then what seemed, in a way, an after thought, was okay, “I gotta get some software running on the host to talk to each other.” There was a meeting called at Santa Barbara, UCSB and Elmer Shapiro from the SRI group chaired the meeting, Vint and I drove up, we were… Did you make the choice to send us up there? Somebody said we should go…

Leonard Kleinrock: I wanted to go the cheapest way, you kept busting my budget.

STEVE CROCKER: That came later, the trip to Santa Barbara was cheap, the expenses grew after that. So, Vint and I… This was August ’68, so this was more than a year before the time that we’re talking about. The contract for the IMPs had not yet been let but it was in process, we met counterparts from the other groups. Bill, were you at that meeting? Jeff Rulifson was there, I remember.

Bill Duvall: Yeah, I was there. That was Jeff Rulifson, [12:31] ____ Elmer Shapiro and…

STEVE CROCKER: And it was a pretty interesting meeting in that there was not much of an agenda, we all came with… To find out what was going on and it was sort of like a cocktail party engagement, where you instantly click with certain people, that you can tell you’re on the same wavelength. And we could see that this communication was going to be more interesting than just logging into a remote machine, or sending a file, those were obvious… We obviously wanted to be able to do that, but we could see a bigger picture and we kind of self-organized after that and decided that we would keep talking, and in the process to keep talking, we said, “Well, we should visit each other’s laboratories,” which is were Len’s comment about busting his travel budget came from. And we understood the irony right at the very instant that we said that, that this network was supposed to make it possible to collaborate at a distance, without having to travel. And the first thing we did was lay out a whole travel schedule, so we could visit each other’s laboratories.

STEVE CROCKER: Those meetings, we engaged in large and small topics. The specification for the fine grain communication had not yet been specified ’cause BBN was not yet working on this and they hadn’t published their interface specifications. So we looked at the bigger picture what kinds of things would you wanna do? We sketched out a number of interesting ideas and we did this just sitting around the table in these occasional meetings every six weeks or eight weeks, and then in the spring of 1969, so about six months before the date we’re talking about here, we said, “Well, we should start writing down some of these ideas after all we’re supposed to be academics and we’re supposed to be doing research, we should write something down.” So we dealt out assignments to each of us, “You write this, you write this, I’ll write this” and then I casually offered that I would organize the notes, which I didn’t think about it at the moment, but over the next couple of weeks, every time I sat down to write what should have been a trivial administrative clerical note, I found myself balking big time, I had trepidation and I realized what it was, it was that the act of writing things down might make it look like these were official important authorized and I was very fearful that some adult was gonna come from the East, I didn’t know whether it would be from Boston or from Washington, but “Who are you guys and who gave you authority to do any of this?”

JOHN MARKOFF: Let me quote from RFC 1, you wrote “very little of what is here is firm and reactions are expected.”

STEVE CROCKER: That’s right, that’s right. So late one evening when I was, I was determined I had to write something down I said, “Look, these things have no status, no authority, write anything you want, write as little as you have in mind, you can write questions without answers and so forth.” Bill had suggested the term “request for comments”, I hadn’t remembered that until recently but it stuck in my mind and I said, just as a matter of form, we will make every one of these notes called a request for comments. I figured it was a temporary hack last maybe six months until there was formal documentation of this network. And the other rule that I put down was that you had to write it before I give you a number ’cause I didn’t want a lot of holes in the sequence. And so that seemed to work pretty well except that it didn’t stop, it just kept going and going and going and when I was asked… We did an index of the first 100 and then I was asked to write something for the first 1000 I thought, oh this is a sorcerer’s apprentice kind of situation where you can’t turn it off.

Vint Cerf: They’re about 8800 RFC.

JOHN MARKOFF: Today.

STEVE CROCKER: Well, and they’re not the same because in the early days we had no other way of communicating. We sent these out by snail mail, by US postage, we had a mailing list and in fact, the mailing list was maintained as one of these RFCs and every time we added somebody to the mailing list, it was another RFCs, another RFC.

JOHN MARKOFF: Bill remembered that you guys flipped the coin to see who would write one and two, is that, your memory?

STEVE CROCKER: I lost, I got RFC 1.

Bill Duvall: I remember it the other way, you won and got RFC 1.

ARPANET and how to make it flexible Enough to Accommodate the Future

JOHN MARKOFF: What was remarkable to me about RFC 1 is that it was about two experiments. Did you guys know much about the online system when you actually set that up?

STEVE CROCKER: We had visited this process from August ’68 to spring of ’69, we had now visited each of the laboratories. What was remarkable particularly in retrospect, was the SRI laboratory, Engelbart’s lab, had… They had invented the mouse and ordinary people didn’t see it for another 30 years or something like that, approximately and a graphics interface with hyperlinks and structured text and everything. So the future was sitting right there and better yet, it wasn’t just you could take a tour and see it in laboratory, that group was using it every day. That was part of their basic thing and so it just had to wait ’til it became commercially viable. But we were living, at least, thinking in a mode of, this is the way the world is gonna be and we were gonna lace it together with this ARPANET and then how could we make it flexible enough so that it can accommodate the future technologies that were coming along?

JOHN MARKOFF: I wanna ask a little bit about the culture of those laboratories at the time that you guys were doing this work. You guys both started early, Steve and Vint, you started as high school students spending regular time on the UCLA campuses, is that right?

STEVE CROCKER: Oh yes.

JOHN MARKOFF: Breaking in even on occasion.

STEVE CROCKER: I was afraid you were going there.

VINT CERF: Wait a minute, Steve got permission from Mike Melkenoff who chairman of the department at the time to use a Bendix G-15 paper tape-based machine at UCLA and I think eventually we got to use the 7090, so we had permission. But one evening we showed up or maybe it was a weekend, we showed up and the door was locked. And so what happened then, Steve?

STEVE CROCKER: Statute of limitations has passed. Vint and I had been playing with some silly equations and decided we would try to explore them numerically, at least… It sounds better now than whatever I was able to say then. So this Bendix G-15 was in a building they called Engineering 1 which I believe is now gone but I did have permission to use it and we arranged to come over from Van Nuys High School in San Fernando Valley, it took a little less time to do than it would take today I think.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: You know the dean is in the audience.

STEVE CROCKER: Tell everybody. So we came over on a Saturday, and the building was locked, and I was crestfallen. Two of us are standing there staring at the door, and Vint notices that the second floor window is open and so one of these crank things. And I’m thinking, we’re not really going to… Next thing I know, he’s on my shoulders.

VINT CERF: I always have, that was the beginning.

STEVE CROCKER: He goes through the window, he comes around to the main door, pushes the bar open, and we taped the door so that we could get in and out easily during the day to go buy some food at lunchtime or whatever. Nobody else was around. The interior doors were all open in the offices. This was long before student demonstrations and all other kinds of things that have beset us. We worked all day and we cleaned up afterwards and we went home. That was spring of ’61. Eleven years later in ’72, I’m working for the Defense Department, I’ve got a top-secret clearance, and the Watergate burglars break in, and they taped the door. And one of their cohorts who’s in the hotel across the street is on lookout, but he doesn’t recognize the threat because the security guard who found it was in plain clothes, and the shiver that went down my spine was something.

JOHN MARKOFF: So… Go ahead, you can tell your side of the story.

VINT CERF: I was at the White House in 1999. Hillary Clinton was doing her Millennium Evenings, Honor the Past and Imagine the Future, and she told that story. So the question is, how the hell did she find out about that?

Was it a Hacker Culture?

JOHN MARKOFF: So Steven Levy has written a book called Hackers, you know that… The term “hacker” meant one thing before it meant something else, and when you guys were first computing in the ’60s, a hacker was someone who was really obsessed with computing. And there was a laboratory at MIT, the iLab, where this culture grew up. Would you call the culture you guys created, both at Menlo Park and LA, similar? Was it a hacker culture in that first sense of shared information?

VINT CERF: Well, it was MIT that adopted that term. You were there.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: I was there, but there was an interesting story. These guys again are guilty. There was some guy on campus that committed some terrible break-in to a computer system. Vint decided to hire him as a programmer. Smart guy, you fired him a few months later, right? Didn’t work out.

STEVE CROCKER: It was a question as to whether he could learn to do something other than breaking into systems, particularly if we said, “Look, it’s not interesting, we’ll give you the keys to everything and see if you can do something constructive,” and…

VINT CERF: So hack was a really cool piece of software. The hacker was somebody who produced really clever code, and that was an honorable title for many years.

JOHN MARKOFF: Bill, was the culture the same at Menlo Park?

BILL DUVALL: No, I wouldn’t say it was at all. The culture in Doug Engelbart’s group, the one that I was in, was basically almost self-contained, and people were very focused on this one vision that we were working on. And, although there was some connection to the outside and interchange, it was very little. The group, in and of itself, was a little bit odd, and for SRI, it was generally disliked, I guess I would say. It was certainly not understood. They did things like… We’d work at all hours and we’d have… Friday afternoons would be for wine and beer, and… This was very un-SRI-ish. And one of the things I remember is when I was interviewing to join the group, the last interview had to be with the head of the engineering department, and he asked a few questions, “Why do you wanna do this now?” I’m saying, “What they’re doing is the future, I want to be with that.” And after a while, he thought about it and he looked over his desk at me and he said, “Son, you don’t think what they’re doing up there is science, do you?”

LEONARD KLEINROCK: John, you know you’re talking about the culture for the period, and there is a very strong component that mattered and helped create what we have today, and it’s the way in which the funding took place. I think you’re familiar with the story, the way ARPA funded the various centers, the universities and… They would go to a great researcher there and say, “Here’s a pile of money. Go do something great. Shoot for the moon. Failure’s okay, go high, keep going, you have the money for a long time and we’re not going to watch you.” Now, what else could you ask for? It was an environment that just generated… It was a golden era. And when that came to a principal investigator, passed it off to these guys. Same idea. They complained we didn’t supervise them. I said, “Go do it. Eventually, if you want something, come back to us, but… ” And they ran with it. You can just hear the stories, the way they organized themselves and created this community across many universities, was a very important component that gave a lift to this whole project.

JOHN MARKOFF: Well, and how quickly did that end? And was it the Proxmire Amendment that ended that era of…

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Not totally, but it hurt a lot. They said, basically, it has to have a military application, has to be competitive. You go to a guy, here’s the money, that’s not competitive, it’s not peer-to-peer, but it worked.

VINT CERF: Well, on the other hand, ARPA has some pretty smart people, and so they created this thing called a Broad Area Announcement which said, “This is the area in which we would like to explore. Would you like to submit proposals for that?” I think we managed to induce the right people to submit the right proposals, and the longevity of support from both NSF and ARPA is countable in decades, and so that’s still true today.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It’s true to… But your point about having really good people at the government deciding where the money should go, people like these two here. They were at ARPA. That level of capability looking out and finding the projects to support. That whole thing worked so well.

JOHN MARKOFF: I wanna ask about the design of the network, but before I go there, you were… A lot has been made of the first crash, and I wanna ask a different question about the first crash. When you type G, there was what is known today as a buffer overflow error. And the machine crashed, and you had to fix that problem, and you started over again. What struck me when I learned about for the first time, is that buffer overflow errors have continued to plague the design of computer systems ever since. And in fact, you might say they’re one of the real vulnerabilities in the design of modern computing. What I don’t understand is when Robert Tappan Morris for example, brought the internet to its knees in 1988, the then young internet, he used a buffer overflow there. Why didn’t the designers…

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Because…

BILL DUVALL: I can answer that, it’s because they didn’t talk to me.

JOHN MARKOFF: Walk us through that.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It’s stupid mistakes.

BILL DUVALL: There are two answers to this. One of them is that the initial specification for the first connection was that all messages would be one character in length, and because of the way that the 940 and time-sharing system worked, when you typed a character on your terminal, it didn’t appear on your terminal, it went to the computer and the computer then sent back that character. That’s called full duplex. And the 940 had what they call command recognition. So as you were logging in, as soon as it realized what you wanted to say, it would tie it back, it would send back the rest of the command. So when you type an L, you got an L, and O, you got an O, and a G, you got G-I-N. Well, that’s three characters. And there was no memory available. Memory was very, very tight in the 940. And so when I was allocating buffers and things like that for output, I allocated one character because that’s what the spec said. And three came along and there was a buffer overflow. Now, that seems to absolve me, but the problem is I wrote the spec.

How Leonard Kleinrock Came to Put Together the Networking Group

JOHN MARKOFF: So, Len, tell us the story of how you came to put together the networking group that actually sort of did this on your end.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Well, I came to UCLA having this theory in my hands, waiting for it to have it implemented. Finally, as I said, ARPA said, “Let’s build a network. So I had to get this group together. As Charlie said, he was working with Gerry Estrin. Gerry Estrin had put together a group of great programmers doing a variety of things. When we got the contract, the whole group moved over to me to jump on this really exciting project. So that’s how this group entered the picture. And they continued to run with it beautifully.

29:13 JOHN MARKOFF: So what about the design ideas? Packet switching seems to be kind of a non-obvious idea. And what was the networking theoretical world like when you were starting this process and why did you would… What attracted you to packet switching?

29:28 LEONARD KLEINROCK: So there was no world. At the time, nobody was thinking about data networking in a serious way. And all my classmates at MIT were working on information theory and coding theory which Claude Shannon had solved fundamentally. And the problems that were left over were small and hard. And I was dragged in to do a PhD. I didn’t want to. My supervisor, “You gotta do it.” So I said, “I’m gonna do it.” I wanted to do something with impact, and I wanna get the best professor I know. So I spoke to Claude Shannon and you may not know his name, but he’s a great man. He took me on, and I looked around and I was surrounded by computers and I said, “One day, they’re gonna have to talk to each other.” And the telephone network was woefully inadequate.

30:13 LEONARD KLEINROCK: So I looked at this problem. Here’s a new problem. If it can be solved, it’ll have impact. And I had an approach. I knew how to basically extract the essence of the system which had to do with what we now call the sharing economy. It’s called Airbnb. If you got a room that’s not being used, if you got a communication channel that’s not being used, let somebody else use it who needs it right now. That whole idea of dynamic resource sharing was a principle that I put into the theory. The whole idea of the packet switching, I analyzed a case where you would chop messages into fixed link things called packets, and handle them one at a time. And that had some advantages.

30:53 LEONARD KLEINROCK: So that whole thing came together. I had done the analysis, did an optimization, and then stood around and extracted the principles as to why this thing works well. Most of the students these days don’t bother to do that. They get a result and they… And “Okay, I’m done,” instead of saying, “What is it teaching me?” And we extracted some principles like, dynamic resource sharing was key, like big systems are better, wanted to study a large network, millions of nodes, instead of tens of nodes. Because then you get emergent properties you don’t see in a small network. And looking at distributed algorithm, distributed control and recognizing nobody’s in control when you have a large network, but you can’t get one node to be in control ’cause it’s too much traffic, too vulnerable, too much traffic going in and out. So distribute it. Once you distribute the control, nobody’s in control. So will that work? So you had to prove it wouldn’t collapse. And you could chop pieces, it would still work. So those are the kinds of things we extracted. Came to UCLA with that, waiting to build it, the opportunity came along as I said, and bang…

32:01 JOHN MARKOFF: And it was a DARPA-funded opportunity. Is that what you’re talking about?

32:04 LEONARD KLEINROCK: DARPA-fund… ARPA funded.

32:05 JOHN MARKOFF: ARPA-funded opportunity. Right.

32:06 LEONARD KLEINROCK: Yes.

Survivability in the Event of a Nuclear War

JOHN MARKOFF: So let me jump up a level. And there’s for many years, been a debate over whether ARPA was funded or in some way back because of the design was about survivability in the event of a nuclear war. This is hotly controversial, is it wrong?

VINT CERF: Yes, it is.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It’s an urban myth, but there’s some truth to it.

JOHN MARKOFF: Okay, Lukasik apparently made that assertion.

VINT CERF: Look, in the video that you saw, you could tell that Taylor and Roberts were trying to figure out how to share computing resources among about a dozen universities that were studying artificial intelligence and computer science for ARPA in the 1960s. They couldn’t buy a new computer for every university, every year, so they said, “We’re gonna build a network and you’re gonna have to share.” So, the whole idea in papers that Roberts and Barry Weston wrote were about resource sharing. Even though some of the early ideas of packet switching came from Paul Baran in the study that he did a RAND Corporation, and that was about building survivable networks for post-nuclear responses and post-nuclear scenario, so we should not conflate those two things. The subsequent internet design, however, did go after this question of survivability in a post-nuclear environment, and we even tested that idea because we used the packet radio system and put radios in the strategic Air Command aircraft, artificially broke up the ARPANET into pieces and then glued it back together using the TCP/IP protocols in packet radio. So there is truth to some of this, but it wasn’t specific to ARPANET as much as it was to the subsequent…

LEONARD KLEINROCK: You know, once.

JOHN MARKOFF: Steve…

STEVE CROCKER: Let me… So this is to say is that sort of the persistent myth and the question is, to what extent there’s truth there, and it’s subtle because there’s various layers. As Vint said, Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts were all focused on how do you build a system that would allow the computers to communicate, and people to communicate, share resources, and the degree of “survivability” had to do with just normal operation. Parts are going to break, lines are gonna go down and so forth. When you talk about survivability in a much more stringent sense, you’re in a different part of the design space, and it isn’t just all or nothing because the worst case, the one that attracts everybody’s attention is imagine nuclear holocaust, and nobody’s ever really focused hard on that problem. And I’ll come back to that in just a second, ’cause I spent some time with Lukasik over the past couple of years, having a discussion about that. But you also have, apropos of what Vint talked about, you have stressful situations, particularly in the military, that are more stressful than ordinary daily operation, but less stressful than the Holocaust kind of total catastrophe, and the kind of survivability and knitting the pieces back together again are important experiments there. But they still won’t take you all the way to what do you do if… In the worst case.

STEVE CROCKER: The other part of the story that I think is very important is this culture of initiative that you described, played out in multiple layers. So, you have the agency, ARPA, which later became known as DARPA, which was created after Sputnik, and inside you had a division into various offices and the office that was of concern to us was this Information Processing Techniques Office. And there was quite a bit of delegation down to the offices and to the program managers, and more importantly, even to the researchers themselves, the principal investigators, to invent the projects. And so, there was as much bottom-up kind of operation and choice of topics and so forth, as there was top-down. It was not a dictatorial thing, like we’re gonna build… This was sort of different from saying, “We’re gonna put a man on the moon,” and everything gets organized to that one objective. It was much, much broader. So, the problem that the director of the agency, there was a series of them, but Steve Lukasik was central for a long period of time, is how does he provide the support for all of these projects to go forward and justify that to the higher levels of authority in the Defense Department and Congress?

STEVE CROCKER: So, a conversation approximately like this took place. Lukasik says to Larry Roberts, “Well, could it solve the reconstitution problem?” And allegedly the answer was, “Well, I suppose.” [chuckle] And there’s no paperwork on this, except that years later, Lukasik wrote “Why I signed the cheques for the ARPANET,” and among, included in there is a little reference to nuclear survivability. But Roberts, I pressed him on that a couple of years ago, I interviewed him and he said, “Well, if I’d really been trying to solve that problem, we would have connected every IMP to four other IMPs.” So, and clearly down at the levels that we were working at, there was zero, absolutely zero attention to that. We were working on the problem that affects us all today. How do you get people to talk to each other? How do you get the computers to talk to each other? How do you accommodate the differences among all these systems and get them and so forth? And we were not at all focused on sort of the hardcore defense problem of the day.

JOHN MARKOFF: Weren’t there some… Go ahead.

VINT CERF: So, wait a minute. I’m sorry, I really feel compelled to jump in here, because there are two different things that we’re talking about. We’ve been talking about the ARPANET, that’s what this big celebration is about, on the first connection of the two hosts. But, I really must insist, Steve, that when Bob Kahn and I started to work on the internet design, it was driven by the idea that we would use these technologies for command and control. It was very driven by exactly a military requirement, and that’s why we ended up with satellites and mobile radio, as well as the original ARPANET. So, I wanna make sure that it is not misunderstood, that the motivations behind the original TCP/IP work was somehow only to do with civilian applications, because frankly it wasn’t.

STEVE CROCKER: Yeah. So, this is the area that takes some care in describing, because of course, and the project and the orientation that you’re working on is very important, but I was trying to say is that that kind of application, the command and control and reconstitution in the case that you lose various pieces, is qualitatively different from trying to imagine a post-nuclear exchange environment in which.

VINT CERF: I accept that although I will argue that we try to test at least some ideas that would be needed in order to contribute to that solution and that’s why we did the artificial break-up of the ARPANET.

How Distributed Architecture Won the Day

JOHN MARKOFF: I’m also very interested in how this distributer architecture won the day. When I showed up as a young reporter in the early 1980s, IBM was pushing this idea of a Token Ring and there were many centralized ideas around. Actually, before I get to that all the computing you guys have talked about IBM and AT&T generally don’t show up in that community that you were building. They were the dominant… Why was that?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It was a proprietary network, they were pushing it, you had an SNA network and IBM SNA network you bought IBM equipment and used their communication protocols.

JOHN MARKOFF: Wasn’t IBM and some of those large companies, weren’t they also skeptical about the idea of this project? They didn’t even bid on this, is that right?

VINT CERF: Right, we’re not skeptical about networking because IBM had SNA, Digital had DECnet, HP had DS, they wanted to network their computers but they wanted only their brands of computers to be interconnected and the defense department didn’t wanna end up trapped in one particular brand of computer for purposes of networking which is why the heterogeneous interconnection of different brands of computers which is demonstrated on the ARPANET and then subsequently expanded to allow multiple packet-switched networks should be interconnected was important to the Defense Department.

STEVE CROCKER: There are multiple times here, if you look at 1972, for example, when the public unveiling of the ARPANET a bunch of… Few good people from AT&T came and looked at it and turned up their nose and walked away. You talked about later in the late 1970s, then IBM and AT&T and others are all pushing networking of their particular flavor and then it took a while for it to settle down.

CHARLEY KLINE: If you go back to ’68 when the IMP project was being… The RFP for the IMP was… AT&T and IBM both refused to bid, they both said, “This is a waste of time, it won’t work.”

LEONARD KLEINROCK: AT&T finally launched in 1983, their great network called Net 1000, three years later they closed it down with a billion dollar loss ’cause they couldn’t do it. The technology is not trivial and they [42:13] ____ never got it going.

First Demonstrations of Email

VINT CERF: Well, I think if first demonstrations of email which came in mid to late 1971 when Ray Tomlinson demonstrated that, very quickly after that.

JOHN MARKOFF: So email was not on the ARPANET in the first two years?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: That’s right, yeah.

VINT CERF: It was a development that it was foreshadowed by use of time-sharing systems for email among the participants on the time-sharing system. Tomlinson at Bolt, Beranek and Newman figured out that he could use file transfers to move messages from one machine to another, he only had to say which machine it was going to and for whom. So he used the only character on the keyboard that wasn’t already used with other operating systems, the ‘@’ sign that’s why he had user@host as the basic form for email. So as soon as email popped up and we all got excited about it, we started seeing mailing list and that’s when I realized that there was a real social element to this. The first mailing list I remember was called Sci-Fi Lovers because we used to argue who were the best science fiction writers and the next one I remember from Stanford was called Yum Yum and it was a restaurant review for the Palo Alto area. It was very clear that this technology had a social component.

JOHN MARKOFF: Do you remember HumanNets?

VINT CERF: Yes I do.

JOHN MARKOFF: Because that was what drew me to the early ARPANET because there you had technologists talking about the impact of technology which was a really interesting window into that role.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: There’s another story, I visit my graduate students, mostly theoretical guys not the software developers, and I walked into their lab one day and instead of doing researches that I wanted them to, they were busy on the machines, intensely, on news groups, restaurants, hiking, astronomy. “What are you doing? Oh my God, this is hot.”And it really caught on.

JOHN MARKOFF: It was social media. Bill.

BILL DUVALL: Just on that, one of the things that, just speaking of email, another kind of social impact was there was a project that was being done joint between Xerox and PARC and a part of Xerox in El Segundo that was being coordinated by email. This was pretty early, this was in the ’70s, mid-’70s. And the thing that became very obvious was that using email to coordinate a project shifted the power. The people that now had the power, not the people that presented well, that could talk well that were big, but they were the people that could write well, and it was just an interesting… Subtle but very interesting shift that was a direct result of basically, this distributed… The networking.

Why Did the Network Name Change from ARPANET to Internet

JOHN MARKOFF: So, here’s another question. How and why did the network name change from ARPANET to internet? And if they could change the name internet now, what would you call it?   That’s a perfect name, it seems to me.

VINT CERF: Well, originally, we called it, the paper that Bob Kahn and I wrote said “A Protocol For Packet Network Intercommunication.” And it took too long to say that. And so, within a year or so, we used the term “internet” to refer to the multiple network thing. I don’t know what I’d call it now, probably a… No, there are some bad words that occur to me. [chuckle]

Moment Understood it was Going to Impact the World

JOHN MARKOFF: One last word. Steve, was there a moment where you understood it was gonna have the impact on the world that it did?

STEVE CROCKER: It was pretty evident, almost instantly to me, that if you had a computer, you would want it connected to the other computers. Now in those days, computers were big. That was a tiny computer by comparison. So, universities, and businesses, and governments had computers, personal computers didn’t exist yet. But it was evident to me that basically, that every computer if you owned it, you would wanna be connected to the network. And so, it was just a question of how long it would take for that to happen. And I thought that was real important from a utility point of view, from a practicality point of view. My head was focused on different kinds of research, much more abstract kinds of things, and so I used to sneer that this networking stuff was only socially useful, it didn’t have any real depth.

Jump to content

• Architecture + Urban Planning
• Educational Technology
• Engineering
• Global Health
• High Performance Computing, an open textbook
• Python for Informatics: Exploring Information, an open textbook

SI / Coursera - Internet History, Technology, and Security

• SI / Coursera - Programming for Everybody
• SI 110 - Introduction to Information Studies
• SI 410 - Ethics and Information Technology
• SI 502 - Networked Computing: Storage, Communication, and Processing
• SI 508 - Networks: Theory and Application
• SI 510 - Special Topics: Data Security and Privacy: Legal, Policy and Enterprise Issues
• SI 521 - Special Topics: Open Educational Resources and the University of Michigan
• SI 563 - Game Theory
• SI 575 - Community Information Corps Seminar
• SI 580 - Understanding Records and Archives: Principles and Practices
• SI 583 - Recommender Systems
• SI 615 - Seminar on Digital Libraries
• SI 626 - Management of Libraries and Information Services
• SI 633 - A Cultural and Material History of the Book from Pre-Gutenberg to Post-Google
• SI 640 - Digital Libraries and Archives
• SI 646 - Information Economics
• SI 657 / 757 - Information Technology and Global Development
• SI 675 - Digitization for Preservation
• SI 655 - Management of Electronic Records
• SI 680 - Contracting and Signaling
• Literature, Science, and the Arts
• Mathematics
• Public Health
• Public Policy
• Romance Languages and Literatures
• Student Organizations
• Open Publications
• Find Open Content You Can Use

Search form

Main menu - top navigation.

Image courtesy of the University of Michigan. All rights reserved.

These materials are from a past semester of this course at the U-M School of Information. For details and a syllabus of the current course, please see https://www.coursera.org/learn/internet-history .

The impact of technology and networks on our lives, culture, and society continues to increase. The very fact that you can take this course from anywhere in the world requires a technological infrastructure that was designed, engineered, and built over the past sixty years. To function in an information-centric world, we need to understand the workings of network technology. This course will open up the Internet and show you how it was created, who created it and how it works. Along the way we will meet many of the innovators who developed the Internet and Web technologies that we use today.

Course Audience

This course has no prerequisites and there will be no programming. Literally anyone can and everyone should take this course.

What You Will Learn

After this course you will not take the Internet and Web for granted. You will be better informed about important technological issues currently facing society. You will realize that the Internet and Web are spaces for innovation and you will get a better understanding of how you might fit into that innovation. If you get excited about the material in this course, it is a great lead-in to taking a course in Web design, Web development, programming, or even network administration. At a minimum, you will be a much wiser network citizen.

Join:  Visit the  course's site  to register for and participate in this class.

Instructor:  Charles Severance

Course Level:  Undergraduate

Available on:   Coursera

This syllabus includes both a calendar-style course outline as well as some notes about the course. Scroll down to see the notes about the course.

Note:  The grading formula was changed from what is described in the second video because we added a peer-graded midterm exam after the video was taped.

Week 1 - July 23

• Introducing the course
• The Dawn of Electronic Computing

Assignment: Quiz

Week 2: - July 30

• High Performance Computing and its Impact
• Getting the first Internet (NSFNet) Funded

Assignment: Peer-Graded Reflection

Week 3 - August 6

• Inventing the World-Wide-Web at CERN
• The dark-ages of the World-Wide-Web
• The Web Bursts onto the Scene

Week 4 - August 13

• The Web Goes Commercial - Battle Lines Get Drawn
• Justice Triumphs - We Can Assume an Open Web
• Commerce Moves to the Web - Amazon, etc.

Peer-Graded Midterm Exam

Week 5 - August 20

• Internets and Packets
• Wireless, Wires, and Fiber Optics
• Electronic "Postcards" Wandering Around the World

    Moving up the Layered Architecture     Transporting all those "Postcards" Reliably

• Application Layer: Why did We Build All this Anyways?

About the Course

Assessments

The purpose of the in-lecture questions and the weekly quizzes is to improve your understanding of the material. The in-lecture quizzes don't count at all. The weekly quizzes do count toward the "grade"but you can take them as many times as you like with your highest score is the one that counts. SInce the purpose of the in-lecture questions and weekly quizzes is to enhance learning you are welcome to discuss the questions with other students in the forums or elsewhere even while you are taking the quizzes.

The midterm and final exam are to be your own work. Please do not discuss the questions until after everyone has finished the two exams. After the exams are all in, you are welcome to discuss the questions with other students.

Peer Grading

We added two peer graded assignments at the last minute when the peer-grading feature became available in Coursera (that is why the recorded videos don't mention the midterm). The first assignment will be at the end of week 2 and will be basically a practice run for us all. The midterm at the end of Week 4 will also be peer graded.

Grade Computation (Updated)

The overall course grade will be weighted 60% on the non-exam grades and 40% on the exams. The mid term and exams will be equally weighted (i.e. 20% each). A "passing" score that earns a certificate is 75% overall. This grade formula is different than the video introduction states as the video introduction was taped before peer grading was available in Coursera.

Certificates

There will be some sort of certificate. We are still working on the exact format, details, and what the certificate will say.

Contacting the Instructor

With so many students it is not possible for the Instructor to directly respond to questions. Hopefully, you will answer each other's questions in the course forums. I will be in the forums from time to time monitoring for problems or issues. Make sure to vote problems or questions up in the forums if you want to make sure a question gets proper attention. You can also follow me on Twitter @drchuck - if you really need to contact me, probably the quickest way to get my attention for small things me is to mention me on Twitter - I will likely see it within a few minutes on my phone - unless I am sleeping or in an airplane.

Under Construction

This is the first time the course is being taught and so there will certainly be room for improvement. Feel free to suggest ways to improve the course.

About the Creators

Charles Severance

Charles is currently a Clinical Associate Professor and teaches in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Charles also works with the IMS Global Learning Consortium as the IMS Affiliate Coordinator. Previously he was the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation and the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project. Charles is the author of the book, "Using Google App Engine" from O'Reilly and Associates. He also wrote the O'Reilly book on High Performance Computing. Charles has a background in standards including serving as the vice-chair for the IEEE Posix P1003 standards effort and edited the Standards Column in IEEE Computer Magazine from 1995-1999. Charles is active in television and radio as a hobby, he has co-hosted several television shows including "Nothin but Net" produced by MediaOne and a nationally televised program about the Internet called "Internet:TCI". Charles appeared for over 10 years as an expert on Internet and Technology as a co-host of a live call-in radio program on the local Public Radio affiliate ( www.wkar.org ). Chuck's hobbies include off-road motorcycle riding, karaoke and playing hockey.   more...

• Ph.D. Computer Science, Michigan State University
• M.S. Computer Science, Michigan State University
• B.S. Computer Science, Michigan State University

• AHA Communities
• Buy AHA Merchandise
• Cookies and Privacy Policy

In This Section

• Why Study History?
• Teaching Resources for Historians
• Mapping the Landscape of Secondary US History Education
• Regional Conferences on Introductory History Courses
• Online Teaching Resources
• History Gateways
• Globalizing the US History Survey
• Tuning the History Discipline
• Future of the African American Past

Digital History Resources

• Extending the Reach of Scholarly Society Work to HBCU Faculty
• AHA Online Teacher Institute in World History

Digital technologies have expanded the reach of scholarship in the way scholars communicate their research to an audience and present findings, as well as influencing the questions they ask in planning a research project. Text analysis, data and text mining, mapping, data visualization, and a variety of other digital methods and tools make forms of research beyond the traditional text-based article or monograph possible, while also encouraging scholars to consider questions of data storage, visual presentation, and user engagement. Here, you can find resources on getting started in digital history, articles on doing digital history, and projects of interest. 

New Digital History Resources!

The AHA has added two new pages to our collection of Digital History Resources:

• Digital History Glossary
• Project Roles and a Consideration of Process and Product

Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in History

The AHA Council has approved the Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in History. Read the guidelines, and get in touch if you need to consult the new Digital History Working Group about implementing these guidelines.

Resources for Getting Started in Digital History

Beginning in 2014, the AHA has hosted a Getting Started in Digital History Workshop at its annual meeting. The workshop offers various tracks, from beginner to advanced, according to the kinds of skills attendees wish to develop. View resources and lineups from the workshops here.

Digital History Lightning Rounds

Since the 2015 annual meeting, each meeting has featured digital projects lightning rounds with impressive lineups of digital projects. Participants usually speak for three minutes each. See the wide range of methodologies, time periods, and geographical regions represented in this archive.

• 2018 Digital Projects
• 2017 Digital Projects
• 2016 Digital Projects
• 2016 Digital Pedagogy
• 2015 Digital Projects

Teaching with #DigHist

Follow Teaching with #DigHist , a new Perspectives Daily series geared toward instructors at every level who are thinking about using digital history projects in their classrooms. Each month, John Rosinbum, a high school and college instructor in Arizona, will review a digital history project, explore what sorts of historical questions it could help students answer, and provide learning-outcome driven, ready-to-use assignments.

Home » Tips for Using the Internet » A Brief History of the Internet

« previous Page 2 of 10 next »

A Brief History of the Internet

Sharing resources.

The Internet started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. Computers in the '60s were large and immobile and in order to make use of information stored in any one computer, one had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.

Another catalyst in the formation of the Internet was the heating up of the Cold War. The Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred the U.S. Defense Department to consider ways information could still be disseminated even after a nuclear attack. This eventually led to the formation of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the network that ultimately evolved into what we now know as the Internet. ARPANET was a great success but membership was limited to certain academic and research organizations who had contracts with the Defense Department. In response to this, other networks were created to provide information sharing.

January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). This allowed different kinds of computers on different networks to "talk" to each other. ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially changed to the TCP/IP standard on January 1, 1983, hence the birth of the Internet. All networks could now be connected by a universal language.

The image above is a scale model of the UNIVAC I (the name stood for Universal Automatic Computer) which was delivered to the Census Bureau in 1951. It weighed some 16,000 pounds, used 5,000 vacuum tubes, and could perform about 1,000 calculations per second. It was the first American commercial computer, as well as the first computer designed for business use. (Business computers like the UNIVAC processed data more slowly than the IAS-type machines, but were designed for fast input and output.) The first few sales were to government agencies, the A.C. Nielsen Company, and the Prudential Insurance Company. The first UNIVAC for business applications was installed at the General Electric Appliance Division, to do payroll, in 1954. By 1957 Remington-Rand (which had purchased the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1950) had sold forty-six machines.

About the OLLC

• About this Site

Related Links

• University System of Georgia
• Welcome to the Information Age
• Starting Your Search
• What All Libraries Have
• A Primer on Databases and Catalogs
• The Great GALILEO
• Tips for Using the Internet
• Giving Credit Where Credit is Due
• Evaluating Sources
• For Distance Education Students

A project of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Send me an email reminder

By submitting, you agree to receive donor-related emails from the Internet Archive. Your privacy is important to us. We do not sell or trade your information with anyone.

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Blackboard Calendar Locations Student Email Moodle my.WakeTech WebAdvisor

• Research Guides
• Course Guides

HIS 111 (World Civilizations I)

• Websites for Your Assignment
• Primary vs. Secondary Sources
• Books and Ebooks
• Databases and Journals for Articles
• Writing and Citation Help
• Ask a Librarian

Recommended Websites

The following websites are great places to find primary sources for your research assignment.  The following sources are not all-inclusive, but the sites are a good place to start your research.

• Internet History Source Book Project-main page (opens in new window) Welcome to The Internet History Sourcebooks Project, a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly for educational use. Primary sources are available if you click on the era you are interested in.
• Internet Ancient History Sourcebook (opens in new window) The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts. These are online resources from many sources. There are speeches, letters, reports and journal articles.
• History of Prehistoric and Ancient Europe EuroDocs is a indexed repository of online sources for European history with selected transcriptions, facsimiles and translations divided into time periods.
• Scrolls from the Dead Sea (opens in new window) This Library of Congress exhibition, Scrolls From the Dead Sea: The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Scholarship brings before the American people a selection from the scrolls which have been the subject of intense public interest. The exhibition describes the historical context of the scrolls and the Qumran community from whence they may have originated; it also relates the story of their discovery 2,000 years later.
• Internet Medieval Sourcebook (opens in new window) The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts. These are online resources from many sources. There are speeches, letters, reports and journal articles.
• History of Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Primary Documents Links connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. As well as video or sound files, maps, photographs or other imagery, databases, and other documentation. The sources cover a broad range of historical happenings (political, economic, social and cultural). The order of documents is chronological wherever possible.
• Internet History Source Book - The French Revolution (opens in new window) The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts. These are online resources from many sources. There are speeches, letters, reports and journal articles. This part of the project focuses on the French Revolution.
• The Labyrinth - Georgetown University (opens in new window) This website provides full-text versions of medieval documents and literature.
• World Digital Library search page The World Digital Library is a free online archive of over 19,000 culturally significant primary source materials from around the world. It is an international collaboration between the Library of Congress, UNESCO, and 158 libraries, museums, archives, and other partners across 60 countries.
• The Perseus Library (opens in new window) The Perseus Library from Duke University covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world.
• Powers of Persuasion: Poster Art from World War II (opens in new window) From the National Archives, this collection of materials includes posters from World War II.
• The Russian Revolution Through the Prism of Propaganda (opens in new window) Posters from the Russian Revolution.
• Smithsonian - Library and Archival Exhibits (opens in new window) A digital, searchable collection of digitized material from around the world.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Resources on Propaganda (opens in new window) Contains links to several online archives of propaganda.
• Yale Law School Avalon Project (opens in new window) This website from Yale Law School provides primary source legal, historical and governmental documents from all over the world. Time range covered is the 17th century to present day.

• Last Updated: Apr 22, 2024 11:52 AM
• URL: https://researchguides.waketech.edu/Berry

Talk to our experts

1800-120-456-456

• History of Internet

What is the Internet?

The Internet is a short form for an interconnected network. It has become a vital part of our lives, helping us connect with people worldwide. The Internet is made of a large number of independently operated networks. It is fully distributed with no central control. Each independently-operated system is motivated to ensure that there is end-to-end connectivity of every part of the network. 

(Image will be Uploaded soon)

The Internet is simply a wire that runs underground and allows two computers to communicate with each other. A server is a particular computer that is connected directly to the Internet. When we talk about specific web pages, they are simply files that are stored on the server’s hard drive. Every server has a unique protocol address or an IP address. IP addresses are essential for computers to find each other.

A short note of the history of the Internet will help you understand when, where, and how the Internet was developed.

History of the Internet

The first question that pops into your mind is probably, “Who started the internet?”. The Internet was developed by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in the 1970s. They began the design of what we today know as the ‘internet.’ It was the result of another research experiment which was called ARPANET, which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. This was initially supposed to be a communications system for the Defense Team of the United States of America - a network that would also survive a nuclear attack. It eventually became a successful nationwide experimental packet network. But when was the first Internet started? It is believed that on 6 August 1991, when the World Wide Web opened to the public.

How Does the Internet Work?

Computers that we use every day are called clients because they are indirectly connected to the Internet through an internet service provider. When you open a webpage on your computer, you connect to the webpage, and then you can access it. Computers break the information into smaller pieces called packets, which are reassembled in their original order. 

If we put the right address on a packet and send it to any computer which is connected as part of the internet, each computer would figure out which cable to send it down next so that it would get to its destination. With several computers on a network, it may create confusion even with unique addresses. This transfer of messages is handled by the Packet Routing Network, and hence a router is required to set up.

The Transfer Control Protocol is another system that makes sure no packet is lost or left behind because it might create a disrupted message at the receiving end.

The below are the steps for how the message is transferred.

First, Computer1 sends a message by IP address to Computer2

The message sent by Computer1 is broken into small pieces- packets.

These small pieces- packets are transferred concerning Transfer Protocol so that the quality is maintained.

Finally, these small pieces- packets reach Computer2 and are reassembled at their IP address.

The Internet works in a more complex manner than these above-given steps, but this might give a basic idea of how the internet works. 

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.

Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf is also named as an internet daddy other than Tim Berners-Lee. 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.

History of HTML

In 1945, Vannevar Bush first introduced the basics of hypertext. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, HTML (hypertext markup language), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators. Along with his colleagues at CERN (an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland), Tim Berners-Lee was the primary author of HTML (hypertext markup language).

Evolution of the Internet

Although the Internet was developed much earlier, it only became popular in households in the 1990s. The emergence of the Internet can be tracked by how many businesses and homes started changing the way they worked and started connecting their laptops and other devices to the Internet. However, the concept of hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) as we know it today, was created only during this time. This meant that people could access the same web pages on their devices now and share information.

There has been a dramatic growth in the number of internet users since its inception. As a result, the number of computer networks that are connected has grown exponentially too. It started with only connecting less than ten computers initially. Today, 440 million computers can be connected directly, making life easier for people across the globe. Sharing information and knowledge has become extremely easy for those that have access to the Internet. The country with the highest number of internet users is China, with 1.4 billion users, followed by India with 1.3 billion and the United States of America with a little over 0.3 billion users.

The Two Main Types of Computer Networks

There are different computer network types, depending on how large they are and how much geographical area they cover. The most common types are Local Area Network (LAN) and Wireless Local Area Network (WAN).

Local Area Network: This is a group of devices such as computers, servers, switches, and printers that are located in the same building. These are near each other. The most common use of LAN is in houses or offices. A common type of LAN is an Ethernet LAN, where two or more computers are connected to the Internet through switches.

Wireless Local Area Network: This is a local area network that uses wireless communication instead of wired communication. In WLAN, two computers use wireless communication to form a local area network. A wifi router is very common in this case. There are no cables involved in this case.

Advantages of Internet

The internet has become a popular name since the introduction of its easy installation and setup. The Internet was first invented for only military and government uses. But now, it is found in every house across the world. The following are the advantages of the internet.

It is a great medium of sharing and has increased connectivity.

With the internet, banking has now become easier. Long tiresome waiting lines have been eliminated since the introduction of e-banking platforms.

E-commerce websites are one of the great advantages of the internet. One can buy groceries, clothes, household items, and much more with the internet.

The Internet is also a great source of entertainment. One can watch videos and movies,  listen to music, and play games, without any hassle.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have brought the world closer.

The education system has also transformed. With the internet, any student across the world can attend online classes.

The most powerful motivator for the Internet to work is the fact that knowledge and information have to be shared amongst people. The article provided useful information about the internet such as its history, working and evolution etc.

FAQs on History of Internet

1. Are there Other Types of Computer Networks?

There are other computer networks like Personal Area Network (PAN) and Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). Personal Area Network is the smallest network of computers, made up of a wireless router. It might be restricted to only one single building and is the most basic network. A metropolitan area network or MAN is a kind of computer network that connects computers that are present within a geographical area that is the size of a metropolitan area. It is generally more prominent than the Local Area Network. Another common type of computer network is a Wide Area Network that connects computers located within the radius of a kilometer.

2. What is the Difference Between the World Wide Web and the Internet?

We might hear the Internet and the World Wide Web being used interchangeably, but both are not the same thing. While the Internet is a global network of computers, the World Wide Web or WWW is only some information that can be accessed through the Internet. So the Internet is a more significant entity and a prerequisite for WWW. We can also consider the Internet to be the infrastructure while WWW is only the service. WWW is the online content that is made available to us through HTML format and the HTTP protocol.

3. Is the Internet dangerous?

With the emergence of the Internet, new forms of exploitation have existed, including spam e-mail and malware, and harmful social behaviour, such as cyberbullying and doxxing. Many organizations collect extensive information from users, which is a violation of privacy.  If you are associated with some organization or you have a big account balance, there is always a risk of being attacked by cybercriminals. The possibility of being attacked by cybercriminals can be avoided by being aware of these cyber traps laid by these cybercriminals.

4. Who controls the Internet?

The Internet is theoretically decentralized and hence controlled by no single entity, many argue that tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon represent a small concentration of organizations that have extraordinary influence over the information and money on the Internet. Some parts of the Internet are blocked through censorship in some countries. No one controls the internet in its entirety. Like the global telephone network, no one can lay claim to the whole thing nor individual, company or government. Although, lots of individuals, companies and governments own certain bits of it.

Internet History

Major objective of this lecture is to describe Internet History.  Internet was Developed by Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Became a useable internet in 1977. The University of California (at Berkeley) incorporated TCP/IP programming into its BSD UNIX operating system in 1983. Public Internet became practical for private organizations to connect to the Internet (mid-late 1980s), due to inexpensive hardware.

Presentation on Real Mode Memory Addressing

Telecommunications and networks, wireless lan in wireless communication, neural networks, soup kitchen service in cash – an open speech, resume format for administration jobs, it is still not aliens mysterious proxima centauri signal turns out to be just us again, postmodernity, general banking of janata bank limited., the brave three hundred, latest post, cathodic modification, anodic protection (ap), new maps assist decision-makers in considering albedo when planting trees, experts fear that climate change will exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases, curbside pickup enhances organic waste composting and decreases methane emissions, key concepts of electromagnetic induction.

• Trending Now
• Foundational Courses
• Data Science
• Practice Problem
• Machine Learning
• System Design
• DevOps Tutorial
• Cyber Security Tutorial

Introduction

• OSI Security Architecture
• Active and Passive attacks in Information Security
• Types of Security Mechanism
• A Model for Network Security

Cyber Technology

• Basics of Wi-Fi
• The Internet and the Web
• What is a Website ?
• Cryptography and Network Security Principles
• Public Key Infrastructure
• What is Electronic Signature?
• Identity and Access Management
• Cloud Computing

Cyber Ethics

• Intellectual Property Rights
• Fundamental Rights (Articles 12-35): A Comprehensive Guide
• Introduction to Ethical Hacking
• What is a Scam?

Cyber Crimes

• Psychological Profiling in Cybersecurity
• Social Engineering - The Art of Virtual Exploitation
• Cyber Stalking
• How to Defend Against Botnets ?
• Emerging Attack Vectors in Cyber Security
• Malware and its types
• What is Phishing?
• Cyber Crime - Identity Theft
• What is Cyber Terrorism?
• What is Proxy Server?

Cyber Crime Techniques

• Worms, Viruses and beyond !!
• Trojan Horse in Information Security

Keyloggers and Spyware

• Types of SQL Injection (SQLi)
• Buffer Overflow Attack with Example
• Reverse Engineering - Software Engineering
• Difference Between Vulnerability and Exploit
• Basic Network Attacks in Computer Network
• Kali Linux - Hacking Wi-Fi
• Web Server and its Types of Attacks
• Types of VoIP Hacking and Countermeasures
• How to Spoof SMS Message in Linux ?
• Difference between Backup and Recovery
• Manual Code Review : Security Assessment
• Penetration Testing - Software Engineering

Prevention and Protection

• What is Vulnerability Assessment?
• Secure coding - What is it all about?
• Chain of Custody - Digital Forensics
• Digital Forensics in Information Security
• Introduction of Computer Forensics
• What is Network Forensics?

Cyber Forensics

• Cybercrime Causes And Measures To Prevent It
• Digital Evidence Collection in Cybersecurity
• Digital Evidence Preservation - Digital Forensics
• Computer Forensic Report Format
• How to Stop Phishing

Cyber Crime Investigation

• Intellectual Property in Cyberspace
• Cyber Security Policy
• History of Cyber Security

What is Internet? Definition, Uses, Working, Advantages and Disadvantages

• Cyber Security Metrics
• What is Cybersecurity Framework?
• Cyber Security, Types and Importance

Cyber security Evolution

• Substitution Cipher
• Difference between Substitution Cipher Technique and Transposition Cipher Technique
• Difference between Block Cipher and Transposition Cipher

Cyber security Objectives

• Data encryption standard (DES) | Set 1
• Strength of Data encryption standard (DES)
• Differential and Linear Cryptanalysis

Classical Encryption Techniques

• Difference between AES and DES ciphers
• Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

Block Ciphers and the Data Encryption Standard

• Implementation of RC4 algorithm
• Introduction to Chinese Remainder Theorem
• Discrete logarithm (Find an integer k such that a^k is congruent modulo b)
• Public Key Encryption

Advanced Encryption Standard

• Key Management in Cryptography
• Implementation of Diffie-Hellman Algorithm

Moreon Symmetric Ciphers

• Message Authentication Requirements
• How message authentication code works?
• Hash Functions in System Security

Introduction to Number Theory

• Whirlpool Hash Function in Python
• HMAC Algorithm in Computer Network

Public-Key Cryptography and RSA

• Types of Authentication Protocols
• Digital Signature Standard (DSS)

Key Management:OtherPublic-Key Cryptosystems

• X.509 Authentication Service
• PGP - Authentication and Confidentiality

Message Authentication and Hash Functions

• IP security (IPSec)
• IPSec Architecture
• Internet Protocol Authentication Header

Hashand MAC Algorithms

• Web Security Considerations
• Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
• Transport Layer Security (TLS)

Digital Signatures and Authentication Protocols

• Intruders in Network Security
• Password Management in Cyber Security

Authentication Applications

Electronic mail security, ip security, web security, malicious software.

Pre-Requisite: Introduction to Internet

The Internet is the foremost important tool and the prominent resource that is being used by almost every person across the globe. It connects millions of computers, webpages, websites, and servers. Using the internet we can send emails, photos, videos, and messages to our loved ones. Or in other words, the Internet is a widespread interconnected network of computers and electronic devices(that support Internet). It creates a communication medium to share and get information online. If your device is connected to the Internet then only you will be able to access all the applications, websites, social media apps, and many more services. The Internet nowadays is considered the fastest medium for sending and receiving information.

History of the Internet

The Internet came in the year 1960 with the creation of the first working model called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency) . It allowed multiple computers to work on a single network which was their biggest achievement at that time. ARPANET uses packet switching to communicate multiple computer systems under a single network. In October 1969, using ARPANET first message was transferred from one computer to another. After that technology continues to grow. 

How is the Internet Set Up?

The internet is set up with the help of physical optical fiber data transmission cables or copper wires and various other networking mediums like LAN, WAN, MAN, etc. For accessing the Internet even the 2G, 3G, and 4G services and the Wifi require these physical cable setups to access the Internet. There is an authority named ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) located in the USA which manages the Internet and protocols related to it like IP addresses.

How Does the Internet Work?

The actual working of the internet takes place with the help of clients and servers . Here the client is a laptop that is directly connected to the internet and servers are the computers connected indirectly to the Internet and they are having all the websites stored in those large computers. These servers are connected to the internet with the help of ISP (Internet Service Providers) and will be identified with the IP address. 

Each website has its Domain name as it is difficult for any person to always remember the long numbers or strings. So, whenever you search for any domain name in the search bar of the browser the request will be sent to the server and that server will try to find the IP address from the Domain name because it cannot understand the domain name. After getting the IP address the server will try to search the IP address of the Domain name in a Huge phone directory that in networking is known as a DNS server (Domain Name Server) . For example, if we have the name of a person and we can easily find the Aadhaar number of him/her from the long directory as simple as that.

So after getting the IP address, the browser will pass on the further request to the respective server and now the server will process the request to display the content of the website which the client wants. If you are using a wireless medium of Internet like 3G and 4G or other mobile data then the data will start flowing from the optical cables and will first reach towers from there the signals will reach your cell phones and PCs through electromagnetic waves and if you are using routers then optical fiber connecting to your router will help in connecting those light-induced signals to electrical signals and with the help of ethernet cables internet reaches your computers and hence the required information. 

For more, you can refer to How Does the Internet Work?

What is an IP Address?

IP Address stands for Internet Protocol Address. Every PC/Local machine is having an IP address and that IP address is provided by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs). These are some sets of rules which govern the flow of data whenever a device is connected to the Internet. It differentiates computers, websites, and routers. Just like human identification cards like Aadhaar cards, Pan cards, or any other unique identification documents. Every laptop and desktop has its own unique IP address for identification. It’s an important part of Internet technology. An IP address is displayed as a set of four-digit like 192.154.3.29. Here each number on the set ranges from 0 to 255. Hence, the total IP address range from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. 

You can check the IP address of your Laptop or desktop by clicking on the Windows start menu -> then right-click and go to network -> in that go to status and then Properties you can see the IP address. There are four different types of IP addresses are available:

• Static IP Address
• Dynamic IP Address
• Private IP Address
• Public IP Address

World Wide Web (WWW)

The world wide web is a collection of all the web pages, and web documents that you can see on the Internet by searching their URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) on the Internet. For example, www.geeksforgeeks.org is the URL of the GFG website, and all the content of this site like webpages and all the web documents are stored on the world wide Web. Or in other words, the world wide web is an information retrieval service of the web. It provides users with a huge array of documents that are connected to each other by means of hypertext or hypermedia links. Here, hyperlinks are known as electronic connections that link the related data so that users can easily access the related information hypertext allows the user to pick a word or phrase from text, and using this keyword or word or phrase can access other documents that contain additional information related to that word or keyword or phrase. World wide web is a project which is created by Timothy Berner’s Lee in 1989, for researchers to work together effectively at CERN . It is an organization, named World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) , which was developed for further development in the web.

Difference Between World Wide Web and the Internet

The main difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet are:

Uses of the Internet

Some of the important usages of the internet are:

• Online Businesses (E-commerce): Online shopping websites have made our life easier, e-commerce sites like Amazon, Flipkart, and Myntra are providing very spectacular services with just one click and this is a great use of the Internet.
• Cashless Transactions: All the merchandising companies are offering services to their customers to pay the bills of the products online via various digital payment apps like Paytm, Google Pay, etc. UPI payment gateway is also increasing day by day. Digital payment industries are growing at a rate of 50% every year too because of the INTERNET.
• Education: It is the internet facility that provides a whole bunch of educational material to everyone through any server across the web. Those who are unable to attend physical classes can choose any course from the internet and can have point-to-point knowledge of it just by sitting at home. High-class faculties are teaching online on digital platforms and providing quality education to students with the help of the Internet.
• Social Networking: The purpose of social networking sites and apps is to connect people all over the world. With the help of social networking sites, we can talk, and share videos, and images with our loved ones when they are far away from us. Also, we can create groups for discussion or for meetings.
• Entertainment: The Internet is also used for entertainment. There are numerous entertainment options available on the internet like watching movies, playing games, listening to music, etc. You can also download movies, games, songs, TV Serial, etc., easily from the internet.

Security and the Internet

Very huge amount of data is managed across the Internet almost the time, which leads to the risk of data breaching and many other security issues. Both Hackers and Crackers can lead to disrupting the network and can steal important information like Login Credentials, Banking Credentials, etc.

Steps to Protect the Online Privacy

• Install Antivirus or Antimalware.
• Create random and difficult passwords, so that it becomes difficult to guess.
• Use a private browsing window or VPN for using the Internet.
• Try to use HTTPS only for better protection.
• Try to make your Social Media Account Private.
• If you are not using any application, which requires GPS, then you can turn GPS off.
• Do not simply close the tab, first log out from that account, then close the tab.
• Try to avoid accessing public Wifi or hotspots.
• Try to avoid opening or downloading content from unknown sources.

There is an element of the Internet called the Dark Web , which is not accessible from standard browsers. To keep safe our data, we can use Tor and I2P, which helps in keeping our data anonymous, that helps in protecting user security, and helps in reducing cybercrime.

Social Impact of the Internet

The social impact of the Internet can be seen in both ways. Some say it has a positive impact as it helps in gaining civic engagement, etc. whereas some say it has a negative impact as it increased the risk of getting fooled by someone over the internet, getting withdrawal from society, etc.

Whatever the impact of Social Media, one thing is that it changed the way of connecting and interacting with others in society. The number of people increasing day by day on social media platforms which helps in constructing new relationships over social media, new communities are made on social media in the interest of the people. Social Media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc are the most used social media platform for both individual and business purposes where we can communicate with them and perform our tasks.

 Advantages of the Internet

• Online Banking and Transaction: The Internet allows us to transfer money online through the net banking system. Money can be credited or debited from one account to the other.
• Education, Online Jobs, Freelancing: Through the Internet, we are able to get more jobs via online platforms like Linkedin and to reach more job providers. Freelancing on the other hand has helped the youth to earn a side income and the best part is all this can be done via the INTERNET.
• Entertainment: There are numerous options for entertainment online we can listen to music, play games can watch movies, and web series, and listen to podcasts, youtube itself is a hub of knowledge as well as entertainment.
• New Job Roles: The Internet has given us access to social media, and digital products so we are having numerous new job opportunities like digital marketing and social media marketing online businesses are earning huge amounts of money just because the Internet is the medium to help us to do so.
• Best Communication Medium: The communication barrier has been removed from the Internet. You can send messages via email, Whatsapp, and Facebook. Voice chatting and video conferencing are also available to help you to do important meetings online.
• Comfort to humans: Without putting any physical effort you can do so many things like shopping online it can be anything from stationeries to clothes, books to personal items, etc. You can books train and plane tickets online.
• GPS Tracking and google maps: Yet another advantage of the internet is that you are able to find any road in any direction, and areas with less traffic with the help of GPS on your mobile.

Disadvantages of the Internet

• Time Wastage: Wasting too much time on the internet surfing social media apps and doing nothing decreases your productivity rather than wasting time on scrolling social media apps one should utilize that time in doing something skillful and even more productive.
• Bad Impacts on Health : Spending too much time on the internet causes bad impacts on your health physical body needs some outdoor games exercise and many more things. Looking at the screen for a longer duration causes serious impacts on the eyes.
• Cyber Crimes: Cyberbullying , spam, viruses, hacking, and stealing data are some of the crimes which are on the verge these days. Your system which contains all the confidential data can be easily hacked by cybercriminals .
• Effects on Children: Small children are heavily addicted to the Internet watching movies, and games all the time is not good for their overall personality as well as social development.
• Bullying and Spreading Negativity: The Internet has given a free tool in the form of social media apps to all those people who always try to spread negativity with very revolting and shameful messages and try to bully each other which is wrong.

For more, you can refer to the Advantages and Disadvantages of the Internet .

Please Login to comment...

Similar reads.

• School Learning
• School Programming

Improve your Coding Skills with Practice

What kind of Experience do you want to share?

© Eric Canha-USA TODAY Sports

Red Sox DFA Veteran Hurler After Inconsistent Stint In Organization

Boston may lose the reliever after recently designating him for assignment

• Author: Patrick McAvoy

In this story:

The Boston Red Sox made a roster move on Friday involving a veteran hurler.

Boston recently called up reliever Joe Jacques to the big league club and he made one appearance. Jacques pitched 1 2/3 innings against the Cleveland Guardians and allowed one earned run.

Although he was just called up to the big leagues, the Red Sox designated him for assignment after just one outing, according to MassLive.com's Chris Cotillo.

"Red Sox designated Joe Jacques for assignment," Cotillo said.

Jacques was selected by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 33rd round of the 2018 Major League Baseball June Amateur Draft out of Manhattan College. He worked his way up through the Pirates' farm system and made it all the way to the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians.

Pittsburgh didn't protect Jacques from selection in the Rule-5 Draft and Boston selected him ahead of the 2023 campaign. The lefty shined in the minor leagues and compiled a 2.54 ERA and 35-to-13 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 39 innings pitched with the Worcester Red Sox and earned his first promotion to the big leagues.

Jacques appeared in 23 games last season with Boston and had a 5.06 ERA and 20-to-10 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 26 2/3 innings pitched.

Now that he has been designated for assignment, clubs will have one week to place a waiver claim on him. If he goes unclaimed, he could either return to the Red Sox's farm system or possibly enter free agency.

No matter what happens next, hopefully, he is able to find success.

More MLB: Dodgers Viewed As Top Landing Spot For Red Sox Slugger If He's Traded

Latest Red Sox News

Angels 'Like' Ex-Red Sox Superstar; Could Los Angeles Sign Six-Time All-Star?

Boston Red Sox' Hurler to Do Something Not Done in Nearly Last 30 Years of Team History

Red Sox Star Dealing With Injury Putting Availability For Opening Day At Risk

Boston Red Sox Officially Name Young Ace Brayan Bello as Opening Day Starter

The San Francisco Giants Had the "Full Throttle" Offseason that the Boston Red Sox Promised to Have

Navigation Menu

Search code, repositories, users, issues, pull requests..., provide feedback.

We read every piece of feedback, and take your input very seriously.

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly.

To see all available qualifiers, see our documentation .

• Notifications

v-sanju/CS661-Big-Data-Assignments-2024

Folders and files.

• Jupyter Notebook 100.0%

What caused Dubai floods? Experts cite climate change, not cloud seeding

• Medium Text

DID CLOUD SEEDING CAUSE THE STORM?

CAN'T CREATE CLOUDS FROM NOTHING

Sign up here.

Reporting by Alexander Cornwell; editing by Maha El Dahan and Alexandra Hudson

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

World Chevron

Fire broke out at energy facilities in Russia's Smolensk region after a Ukraine-launched drone attack and people were evacuated from parts of Lipetsk in Russia's southwest after a drone there fell on an industrial park, regional officials said.

This is our moment to make history, the same way the Rural Electrification Act impacted the 1930s

From downtown Oklahoma City and Tulsa to the far edges of the Panhandle and Ouachita Mountains, high-speed internet is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity.

For decades, the conversation about expanding internet access has taken place without a plan of action. Until now.

The Oklahoma Broadband Governing Board recently approved 142 ARPA State and Local Fiscal Recover Fund grants totaling $374 million to 31 internet service providers — from locally and family owned operations to rural cooperatives to investor-owned corporations. When factoring in the private match requirement, the total investment is around $500 million.

The awards will expand broadband access in 57 of the state’s 77 counties, connecting 20% of the unserved and underserved.

I like to think this is our moment to make history in the same way the Rural Electrification Act impacted the 1930s.

More: Who will lose if Congress doesn't approve program extension that assists with internet cost?

Farms, ranches and tiny communities remained dark long after cities and towns were powered by electricity. Those rural areas were considered “the dark land.”

While communication technology has advanced quite a bit in the last three decades, the investment wasn’t focused on rural Oklahoma. They are again in the dark land. Our job is to bring those residents up to speed.

If the COVID pandemic taught us anything, we learned you can run a multi-billion-dollar company from a laptop in your living room. You can also attend college classes, visit with your doctor, receive urgent weather and wildfire updates, and have video chats with your out-of-state grandchildren. But to make that a reality, you must have access.

In order to connect rural residents, it will take major investments.

In the coming months, internet service providers will compete for $159 million in Capital Projects Funds for further service expansion, but it doesn’t stop there. By the end of 2025, BEAD, the largest broadband infrastructure program at $797 million, will be awarded.

If the results of our first program are any indication of what to expect with our next two infrastructure programs, we are looking at hundreds of more projects across the state and over 100,000 more homes and businesses served.

These projects will not only bring high-speed internet to communities lacking access but will also bring high-paying jobs to a growing workforce.

Infrastructure buildout will create immediate demand for workers to install the lines and equipment.

More: High-speed internet grants of more than $300 million awarded by Oklahoma officials

For young students considering career options, or those looking for a fresh start, there has never been a better time to enter the broadband industry. OSU Institute of Technology in Okmulgee and career technology centers across the state are training the workers, who can earn upwards of $60,000 per year.

While this historic moment is funded with federal tax dollars, expanding high-speed internet service statewide would not be happening without the full support of the governor and Legislature. Their vision established the governing board and office to effectively administer the grants, paving the way for the results we see today.

These results are guaranteed to bring a brighter future for all Oklahomans regardless of their zip code.

Mike Sanders is the Oklahoma Broadband Office executive director.

• Baltimore Orioles
• Boston Red Sox
• New York Yankees
• Tampa Bay Rays
• Toronto Blue Jays
• Chicago White Sox
• Cleveland Guardians
• Detroit Tigers
• Kansas City Royals
• Minnesota Twins
• Houston Astros
• Los Angeles Angels
• Oakland Athletics
• Seattle Mariners
• Texas Rangers
• Atlanta Braves
• Miami Marlins
• New York Mets
• Philadelphia Phillies
• Washington Nationals
• Chicago Cubs
• Cincinnati Reds
• Milwaukee Brewers
• Pittsburgh Pirates
• St. Louis Cardinals
• Arizona Diamondbacks
• Colorado Rockies
• Los Angeles Dodgers
• San Diego Padres
• San Francisco Giants

Sports. Honestly. Since 2011

Report: former marlins first baseman designated for assignment.

• April 23, 2024
• Matt Graves, Site Manager

The Chicago Cubs are designating Garrett Cooper for assignment, according to Robert Murray of FanSided.com. The former All-Star signed a non-roster minor league deal with the Cubs to get into camp.  He only appeared in 10 games but hit a pair of home runs and a double over 30 trips to the plate. Cooper, 33, has a .231/.333/.500 batting line in exhibition play. Cooper made Chicago’s Opening Day roster and offered a veteran bat to play first base and DH duties. He was slashing a solid .270/.341/.432 this season, echoing his career betting line.

He will be the corresponding move for Matt Mervis , as Tommy Birch of the Des Moines Register reports that Mervis is being called up . The Cubs have seven days to either trade, waive or release Cooper, who couldn’t be optioned to Triple-A.

On ESPN1000, @JesseRogersESPN confirms @TommyBirch report that Matt Mervis is coming up, and adds that Garrett Cooper is being DFA’d to make room. — Bleacher Nation (@BleacherNation) April 23, 2024

Garrett Cooper Designated for Assignment

Cooper, a sixth-round pick in the 2013 draft, made his major league debut with the New York Yankees in 2017. He spent most of his career with the Marlins. He was an effective hitter when healthy, hitting .269/.338/.436 for the club. Cooper’s production fell off last season with a .256/.296/.426 line in 82 games. Following a trade to the San Diego Padres, Cooper’s time out west wasn’t any better. He hit a dismal .239/.323/.402 line as he hit the open market coming off the worst offensive season of his career.

Cooper is a .268 hitter with 56 home runs and 22 RBI in 481 career games. He was a National League All-Star in 2022. It won’t be a surprise if another team claims Cooper from the Cubs, who brings plenty of versatility to the table. The Boston Red Sox were linked to Cooper during the winter and they may draw interest in him again.

Matt Mervis Promotion

The Cubs will call up their hot-hitting young first baseman. Mervis, 26, made his big league debut last season, struggling with a .167/.242/.289 batting line with three home runs in 99 plate appearances. This season, in Triple-A Iowa, he’s hitting .288/.402/.606 with five home runs and six doubles. Mervis had made plenty of loud contact as more than 60 percent of his batted balls cleared the 95 mph threshold. It’s undecided on how the Cubs will manage first base responsibilities between Mervis and fellow rookie Michael Busch . Both are left-handed hitters, with Mervis taking the place of the right-handed Cooper.

Chicago also has Mike Tauchman in the outfield who they often platoon against left pitchers.

Main Photo: © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports

Reigning NL MVP Makes History by Setting Braves Franchise Record

The reigning National League MVP is at it again. Coming off the first 40-70 season in MLB history, Ronald Acuña Jr. has 10 steals, which

Club Broadcaster Discusses the Royals Chances to Contend

The Kansas City Royals are off to a good start led by Bobby Witt Jr. and a young core. Since the Royals won the World

Orioles Recall Former First Round Draft Pick After Injury

The Baltimore Orioles are planning to recall their No. 4 prospect, outfielder Heston Kjerstad, to replace the injured Austin Hays.   The Orioles plan to

Cubs To Call Up Top Prospect

After getting 90 at-bats in 2023 at the big league level, former organizational top prospect Matt Mervis has been called up to the show by

Send Us A Message