Brief History of the Internet

The internet can be traced be traced back in the late 1960s. In July 1968, the US Department  of Defense, Advanced Research Protection Agency (ARPA) announced a proposition requesting the development of protocols to link 4 sites: University of Utah, University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, and University of California at Santa Barbara. 

They were all connected at 1969 and the network was called the ARPANET. There were only a small number of facilities available for the ARPANET, but users can login, like for example a user of the University of Utah could log into the compter at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and can transfer files between systems.

In the year 1981, 200 sites were connected together through the ARPANET which was composed of many incompatible networks using different types of technology. The problems of enabling the communication between users of different types of technology were, little by little, overcome by the specification of the communication protocols, TCP and IP.

Arpanet Logical Map

 By the middle of the 1980's, all US and many worldwide inter-university networks ware using TCP/IP protocols to communicate with one another. As the usage of the internet grew, some business men began to realize that it was a highly exploitable resource. Never before, there had been a medium with the capacity to reach so many people across such a wide geographical area in such a short space of time.

This has been increased by the influence of the World Wide Web, a mechanism for publishing information and offering electronics services for anyone with access to the internet. The World Wide Web was launched during 1992 when there were 50 web servers. By the end of 1993 there were 700 servers on the web and at the turns of the millenium the numbers involved are so enormous, that no-one is rate they are increasing, prepared to estimate exactly how many web servers exist, or at what rate they are increasing.