A lot of the younger generation today has no idea how the internet came into existence. They just know it’s there and they can’t remember a time without it.
Those of us that are older remember when we had to send an actual letter to somebody or pick up and dial a rotary phone if we wanted to talk with somebody.
Well, the times certainly changed and with that here is a brief history of how the thing that so many people use and love daily came into being.
The Internet got its start back in the 60’s with an agency called DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) which is a US Department of Defense organization.
They were tasked to develop a method of transferring packets of data over a network and this laid the ground work for the introduction of the TCP/IP framework which was introduced in 1982 from the Computer Science Network. It is from this setup of protocols everything you see today is possible.
In early 1980, the NSF created 5 super computer centers which were interlinked by 56Kbps connections with the goal being to allow these centers to communicate with each other electronically. It was during the 80’s that email and other future abilities of the Internet where theorized by Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee who is an English computer scientist. That’s right; email was just a theory back then.
Before the advent of a graphical browser that was easy to use called Netscape, your means of accessing the Internet were pretty much restricted to a text interface. Think the command prompt on a DOS screen. No pictures, nothing but text.
During the 80s and 90s the Internet and its infrastructure grew as technology and methods were developed and it wasn’t until the late 90s and early 2000 that the business community really became aware of the power of what the Internet offered in letting them market their products. Once business adopted it, then things really took off.
So there you have it, a very brief lesson on the Internet. There are a lot of things that could be written about during that time, but now you know the very basics of where this thing that is a part of your daily life came from.