Understanding the Internet

The Internet has a rich and exciting history, founded on mental illness, violence and international intrigue, merged together with the innovative new technology of the telegraph system.

Huh?

The Internet actually owes its beginnings to paranoia and the Cold War. The US government needed a way to communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear war. At that time, much of the government's secure communication was "point to point": information goes from one point to another in a relatively straight line, such as when you string a wire between the two places trying to talk.

Unfortunately, with point to point communication, if any part of the network between the two points was destroyed, so was communication. What was needed was a network where data could find alternative routes even if a portion of that network got blown to smithereens.

In 1969, the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) developed just the thing, which they eventually called ARPANET. This network used a system called "packet switching". With packet switching, information is split up into packets. Even if direct communication was cut off, these "smart packets", each with its own addressing information ,could still find their way to their final destination.

At first the ARPANET was used by scientist and researchers at government-funded institutions. It slowly grew in popularity and began to evolve into the modern-day Internet, with the addition of inventions like email (in 1972) and TCP/IP (Transmission control protocol Internet Protocol, a set of protocols that allowed different networks to communicate with each other). As the modern-day Internet grew, the old ARPANET was decommissioned.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics, developed an idea that was to become the World-Wide Web. Eventually, as commercial restrictions were lifted from the Internet, new developments made ease of use less of an issue, and the World-Wide Web took off, making it the everyday tool that it is today.

HOBBES' INTERNET TIMELINE, http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline, gives a brief history of Internet milestones from 1957 to present. (Not to be confused with The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less .)

The Internet Archive, http://www1.archive.org/, has saved actual content from the Internet over time. You can view Websites from 1995, re-live home video delivery from kozmo.com, and a lot more.