From A.R.P.A.N.E.T to INTERNET
The Internet has been here with us for the last 30+ years and completely transformed our everyday lives.
Not only, did it bring a huge worldwide revolution but it helped improve technologies and also spread information on a global scale. Stats prove the enormous growth of internet users, as from 1995 to 2019 internet users grew from barely 16 million to 4.536 billion with an annual growth rate of 26.53%.
Numbers don’t lie and the truth is we are now surrounded by tech devices that use the internet all the time.
How was the Internet created and what is the story behind its creation?
In order to see the whole picture, we have to travel back in time, to 1969!
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) invested money in a plan that had as a primary goal the creation of the first-ever “Network”. This network was named A.R.P.A.N.E.T. and became the first-ever network in the world!
A.R.P.A.N.E.T. became a useful tool that connected the American Universities allowing them to share information, ideas and data in a revolutionary way.
By the late 60s, A.R.P.A.N.E.T. gave a new meaning to how Personal Computers were being used till then. Before that, Personal Computers did not communicate with each other. But with A.R.P.A.N.E.T. computers used the local network to communicate and share data.
In 1972 thanks to this network, popped up a new technology called “EMAIL”!
Ray Tomlinson created the Email technology for A.R.P.A.N.E.T., by combining a pair of operating system applications called Tenex, the SNDMSG and READMAIL. Tomlinson chose the symbol “@” as the linking chain between the name of the recipient and the host, thus creating today’s well-known email structure:
myname @ gmail.com
A.R.P.A.N.E.T. built the foundation for Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World Wide Web 20 years later!
The era of Internet
In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, while working on CERN invented the World Wide Web (WWW). In the beginning, Tim created the WWW as a solution to a problem. Back then scientists and universities couldn’t share information and valuable data in an automated way, thus making research and development harder. Tim and Robert Cailliau (a Belgian Systems Engineer) managed to create the first Web Server and Web Browser in CERN. Since then, of course, the web transformed into a global scale system. People around the world enjoy the privilege of having access to this technology!
Not even Tim himself couldn’t imagine the gigantic scale his invention would take within the next 30+ years!