40 years later, Internet continues to spark creativity
Looking back over the years, the Internet has evolved from a klugey and clunky messaging and file sharing pipeline into being the networking backbone for most of what is happening and will continue to happen in information processing and technology.
The evolution of the Internet has sparked a major revolution in computing, creating new business models in collaborative messaging, software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing, unified communications, and managed network services.
As a result of the increased activity on the Internet, networking architectures are changing dramatically resulting in more robust wired and wireless structures and more capable and higher-performance WANs.
But, like everything in life, the longest and most remarkable journeys begin with the first step, and the development and launch of the Internet is no exception.
The Internet was born on Sept. 2, 1969 when two computers at the University of California, Los Angeles exchanged small snippets of meaningless data in a first test of the Arpanet, an experimental military network.
The first connection between two sites happened almost two months later when the computers at UCLA "talked" with those at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA (although the network crashed after the entering the first two letters of the word "logon").
Subsequent key events over the years included:
- The development of TCP by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974, allowing multiple networks to communicate;
- Creation of the domain naming system in 1983, bringing to life such now common appendages as .com, .gov, and .net.
- The creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, first developed to remotely control computers at CERN;
- The development of the Mosaic Web browser by Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois in 1993, the first Internet platform to combine graphics and text on a single page.
More important dates in the evolution of the Internet, from its birth to current state, are available in an Associated Press dispatch on Google News.
A special thanks to George Chang and 2in10er Michael Kennedy for bringing this to our attention.
