HISTORY OF INTERNET
The history of the Internet begins with the development of
electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of packet networking
originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, Great
Britain, and France. The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as
the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET
(which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol.) The first
message was sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard
Kleinrock's laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the
second network node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
Moreover, internet is a global system of interconnected
computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to
link several billion devices worldwide. It is an international network of
networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and
government packet switched networks, linked by a broad array of electronic,
wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an
extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked
hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), the
infrastructure to support email, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and
telephony.
Internet Timeline
1969
ARPA (Advanced Research
Projects Agency) goes online in December, connecting four major U.S.
universities. Designed for research, education, and government organizations,
it provides a communications network linking the country in the event that a
military attack destroys conventional communications systems.
1972
Electronic mail is
introduced by Ray Tomlinson, a Cambridge, Mass., computer scientist. He uses
the @ to distinguish between the sender's name and network name in the email
address.
1973
Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is designed and in 1983 it becomes the
standard for communicating between computers over the Internet. One of these
protocols, FTP (File Transfer Protocol), allows users to log onto a remote computer,
list the files on that computer, and download files from that computer.
1976
Presidential candidate
Jimmy Carter and running mate Walter Mondale use email to plan campaign events.
Queen Elizabeth sends
her first email. She's the first state leader to do so.
1982
The word “Internet” is
used for the first time.
1984
Domain Name System (DNS)
is established, with network addresses identified by extensions such as .com,
.org, and .edu.
Writer William Gibson
coins the term “cyberspace.”
1985
Quantum Computer
Services, which later changes its name to America Online, debuts. It offers
email, electronic bulletin boards, news, and other information.
1988
A virus called the
Internet Worm temporarily shuts down about 10% of the world's Internet servers.
1989
The World
(world.std.com) debuts as the first provider of dial-up Internet access for
consumers.
Tim Berners-Lee of CERN
(European Laboratory for Particle Physics) develops a new technique for
distributing information on the Internet. He calls it the World Wide Web. The
Web is based on hypertext, which permits the user to connect from one document
to another at different sites on the Internet via hyperlinks (specially
programmed words, phrases, buttons, or graphics). Unlike other Internet
protocols, such as FTP and email, the Web is accessible through a graphical
user interface.
1990
The first effort to
index the Internet is created by Peter Deutsch at McGill University in
Montreal, who devises Archie, an archive of FTP sites.
1991
Gopher, which provides
point-and-click navigation, is created at the University of Minnesota and named
after the school mascot. Gopher becomes the most popular interface for several
years.
Another indexing system,
WAIS (Wide Area Information Server), is developed by Brewster Kahle of Thinking
Machines Corp.
1993
Mosaic is developed by
Marc Andreeson at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
It becomes the dominant navigating system for the World Wide Web, which at this
time accounts for merely 1% of all Internet traffic.
1994
The White House launches
its website, www.whitehouse.gov.
Initial commerce sites
are established and mass marketing campaigns are launched via email,
introducing the term “spamming” to the Internet vocabulary.
Marc Andreessen and Jim
Clark start Netscape Communications. They introduce the Navigator browser.
1995
CompuServe, America
Online, and Prodigy start providing dial-up Internet access.
Sun Microsystems
releases the Internet programming language called Java.
1996
Approximately 45 million
people are using the Internet, with roughly 30 million of those in North
America (United States and Canada), 9 million in Europe, and 6 million in
Asia/Pacific (Australia, Japan, etc.). 43.2 million (44%) U.S. households own a
personal computer, and 14 million of them are online.
1997
On July 8, 1997,
Internet traffic records are broken as the NASA website broadcasts images taken
by Pathfinder on Mars. The broadcast generates 46 million hits
in one day.
The term “weblog” is
coined. It’s later shortened to “blog.”
1998
Google opens its first
office, in California.
1999
College student Shawn
Fanning invents Napster, a computer application that allows users to swap music
over the Internet.
The number of Internet users worldwide reaches 150 million by the beginning of
1999. More than 50% are from the United States.
“E-commerce” becomes the new buzzword as Internet shopping rapidly spreads.
MySpace.com is launched.
2000
To the chagrin of the
Internet population, deviant computer programmers begin designing and
circulating viruses with greater frequency. “Love Bug” and “Stages” are two
examples of self-replicating viruses that send themselves to people listed in a
computer user's email address book. The heavy volume of email messages being
sent and received forces many infected companies to temporarily shut down their
clogged networks.
The Internet bubble bursts, as the fountain of investment capital dries up and
the Nasdaq stock index plunges, causing the initial public offering (IPO)
window to slam shut and many dotcoms to close their doors.America Online buys Time
Warner for $16 billion. It’s the biggest merger of all time.
2001
Napster is dealt a
potentially fatal blow when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San
Francisco rules that the company is violating copyright laws and orders it to
stop distributing copyrighted music. The file-swapping company says it is
developing a subscription-based service.
About 9.8 billion electronic messages are sent daily.
Wikipedia is created.
2002
As of January, 58.5% of
the U.S. population (164.14 million people) uses the Internet. Worldwide there
are 544.2 million users.The death knell tolls for Napster after a bankruptcy judge ruled in September
that German media giant Bertelsmann cannot buy the assets of troubled Napster
Inc. The ruling prompts Konrad Hilbers, Napster CEO, to resign and lay off his
staff.
2003
It's estimated that
Internet users illegally download about 2.6 billion music files each month.
Spam, unsolicited email, becomes a server-clogging menace. It accounts for
about half of all emails. In December, President Bush signs the Controlling the
Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM Act),
which is intended to help individuals and businesses control the amount of
unsolicited email they receive.Apple Computer introduces Apple iTunes Music Store, which allows people to
download songs for 99 cents each.Spam, unsolicited email,
becomes a server-clogging menace. It accounts for about half of all emails.Apple Computer
introduces Apple iTunes Music Store, which allows people to download songs for
99 cents each.
2004
Internet Worm, called
MyDoom or Novarg, spreads through Internet servers. About 1 in 12 email
messages are infected.Online spending reaches
a record high—$117 billion in 2004, a 26% increase over 2003.
2005
YouTube.com is launched.
2006
There are more than 92
million websites online.
2007
Legal online music
downloads triple to 6.7 million downloads per week.
Colorado Rockies'
computer system crashes when it receives 8.5 million hits within the first 90
minutes of World Series ticket sales.The online game, World
of Warcraft, hits a milestone when it surpasses 9 million subscribers worldwide
in July.
2008
In a move to challenge
Google's dominance of search and advertising on the Internet, software giant
Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion.In a San Fransisco
federal district court, Judge Jeffrey S. White orders the disabling of
Wikileaks.org, a Web site that discloses confidential information. The case was
brought by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, located in the Cayman Islands, after a
disgruntled ex-employee allegedly provided Wikileaks with stolen documents that
implicate the bank in asset hiding, money laundering, and tax evasion. Many web
communities, who see the ruling as unconstitutional, publicized alternate
addresses for the site and distributed bank documents through their own
networks. In response, Judge White issues another order to stop the
distribution of bank documents.Microsoft is fined $1.3
billion by the European Commission for further abusing its dominant market
position, and failing to comply to their 2004 judgment, which ordered Microsoft
to give competitors information necessary to operate with Windows. Since 2004,
Microsoft has been fined a total of $2.5 billion by the Commission for not
adhering to their ruling.
URL
URL is an acronym that stands for Uniform Resource Locator
and is a reference (an address) to a resource on the Internet. URL strings
consist of three parts (substrings):
1. network protocol
2. host name or address
3. file or resource location
4.These substrings are separated by special characters as
follows: protocol :// host / location
URL Protocol
The 'protocol' substring defines a network protocol to be
used to access a resource. These strings are short names followed by the three
characters '://' (a simple naming convention to denote a protocol definition).
Typical URL protocols include http://, ftp://, and mailto://.
URL Host
The 'host' substring identifies a computer or other network
device. Hosts come from standard Internet databases such as DNS and can be
names or IP addresses. For example, compnetworking.about.com is the host for
this Web page.
URL Location
The Domain Name System
The DNS translates Internet
domain and host names to IP addresses. DNS automatically converts the names we
type in our Web browser address bar to the IP addresses of Web servers hosting
those sites.
DNS implements a distributed database to store
this name and address information for all public hosts on the Internet. DNS
assumes IP addresses do not change (are statically assigned rather than
dynamically assigned).
The DNS database resides on a hierarchy of
special database servers. When clients like Web browsers issue requests
involving Internet host names, a piece of software called the DNS resolver
(usually built into the network operating system) first contacts a DNS server
to determine the server's IP address. If the DNS server does not contain the
needed mapping, it will in turn forward the request to a different DNS server
at the next higher level in the hierarchy. After potentially several forwarding
and delegation messages are sent within the DNS hierarchy, the IP address for
the given host eventually arrives at the resolver, that in turn completes the
request over Internet Protocol.
Examples of top level domains:
Generic top level domains:
- .com
- .biz
- .info
- .edu
- .mil
- .net, etc.
Country codes (2 character codes):
- .jp,
- .sw,
- .us,
- etc.
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