A brief history of the internet
BY: JAMES WILLIAMSON / SOURCES: LIVESCIENCE, GUARDIAN
Believe it or not, but life did exist before the internet. But things were done differently. Today, thanks to the internet, communication, business, TV, medicine, shopping, driving - most things - are done faster, more instantly, and probably more efficiently. So what is the internet, what is the world wide web, how does it work, and how did it evolve?
What is the internet?
The internet is the global network of cables, computers, data centres, routers, servers, repeaters, satellites and wifi towers that allows digital information to travel around the world. Information in the internet travels through about 300 submarine cables as thick as a garden hose, within which are bundles hair-thin fibre optics that carry data at the speed of light. The cables range from the 80-mile Dublin to Anglesey connection to the 12,000-mile Asia-America Gateway, which links California to Singapore, Hong Kong and other places in Asia. In 2008, damage to two main cables near the Egyptian port of Alexandria affected tens of millions of internet users in Africa, India, Pakistan and the Middle East.
internet undersea cable networks
What is the world wide web?
The World Wide Web - ‘the web’ - is a way to view and share information over the internet. This information - text, music, photos or videos - is written on web pages like the one you’re currently reading, served up by a web browser.
Information on the web is available by knowing the web page address or doing a web search. Google, a web browser, handles more than 40,000 searches per second and has 60 percent of the global browser market through Chrome. There are nearly two billion websites but the top 0.1 percent of websites (roughly five million) attract more than half of the world’s web traffic. The most trafficked sites include Google, YouTube, Facebook, the Chinese site Baidu, Instagram, Yahoo, Twitter, the Russian social network VK.com, Wikipedia, Amazon, and a smattering of porn sites.
Today, many people prefer more focused information via apps, rather than browsing the web. The most popular apps are news, messages, weather forecasts, and videos.
What is the dark web?
The web has three layers: surface, deep and dark. Standard web browsers trawl the surface web, the pages that are most visible. Under the surface is the deep web - a mass of pages not indexed. These include pages held behind passwords – the kind found on the office intranet, for example, and pages no one links to, since Google and others build their search indexes by following links from one web page to another. Within the deep web is the dark web containing sites with addresses that hide them from view. To access the dark web, you need special software. While the dark web has plenty of legitimate uses, not least to preserve the anonymity of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, a substantial portion is driven by criminal activity.
How many people are online?
A total of 5.03 billion people around the world use the internet today - about 63.1 percent of the world’s total population. The latest data indicate that the world’s connected population grew by almost 180 million in the 12 months to July 2022. There are now fewer than 3 billion people who remain unconnected to the internet. Most are located in Southern and Eastern Asia, and in Africa. Internet users continue to increase at an annual rate of close to 4 percent, and current trends suggest that two-thirds of the world’s population should be online sometime in the second half of 2023.
How did the internet evolve?
Credit for the initial concept that developed into the World Wide Web is typically given to Leonard Kleinrock. In 1961, Kleinrock wrote about ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet. ARPA-funded researchers developed many of the protocols used for internet communication today.
While at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee developed a program called Enquire which could store information in files that contained connections (‘links’) both within and among separate files. This technique became known as ‘hypertext’. In 1989 Berners-Lee drew up a proposal for creating a global hypertext document system that would make use of the internet. The goal was to provide researchers with the ability to share their results, techniques, and practices without having to exchange e-mail constantly. Instead, researchers would place such information ‘online’ so their peers could immediately retrieve it anytime.
We provide below a timeline of the internet’s evolution:
INTERNET TIMELINE:
1960s:
1965: Two computers at MIT Lincoln Lab communicate with one another using packet-switching technology.
1968: Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) unveils the final version of the Interface Message Processor (IMP) specifications. BBN wins ARPANET contract.
1969: On Oct. 29, UCLA’s Network Measurement Center, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of California-Santa Barbara and University of Utah install nodes. The first message is "LO," which was an attempt by student Charles Kline to "LOGIN" to the SRI computer from the university. However, the message was unable to be completed because the SRI system crashed.
1970–1980:
1972: BBN’s Ray Tomlinson introduces network email. The Internet Working Group (INWG) forms to address need for establishing standard protocols.
1973: Global networking becomes a reality as the University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway) connect to ARPANET. The term internet is born.
1974: The first Internet Service Provider (ISP) is born with the introduction of a commercial version of ARPANET, known as Telenet.
1974: Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn (the duo said by many to be the Fathers of the Internet) publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which details the design of TCP.
1976: Queen Elizabeth II hits the “send button” on her first email.
1979: USENET forms to host news and discussion groups.
1980–1990:
1981: The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a grant to establish the Computer Science Network (CSNET) to provide networking services to university computer scientists.
1982: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, emerge as the protocol for ARPANET. This results in the fledgling definition of the internet as connected TCP/IP internets. TCP/IP remains the standard protocol for the internet.
1983: The Domain Name System (DNS) establishes the familiar .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int system for naming websites. This is easier to remember than the previous designation for websites, such as 123.456.789.10.
1984: William Gibson, author of "Neuromancer," is the first to use the term "cyberspace."
1985: Symbolics.com, the website for Symbolics Computer Corp. in Massachusetts, becomes the first registered domain.
1986: The National Science Foundation’s NSFNET goes online to connected supercomputer centres at 56,000 bits per second — the speed of a typical dial-up computer modem. Over time the network speeds up and regional research and education networks, supported in part by NSF, are connected to the NSFNET backbone — effectively expanding the Internet throughout the United States. The NSFNET was essentially a network of networks that connected academic users along with the ARPANET.
1987: The number of hosts on the internet exceeds 20,000. Cisco ships its first router.
1989: World.std.com becomes the first commercial provider of dial-up access to the internet.
1990–2000:
1990: Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, develops HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This technology continues to have a large impact on how we navigate and view the internet today.
1991: CERN introduces the World Wide Web to the public.
1992: The first audio and video are distributed over the internet. The phrase "surfing the internet" is popularised.
1993: The number of websites reaches 600 and the White House and United Nations go online. Marc Andreesen develops the Mosaic Web browser at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. The number of computers connected to NSFNET grows from 2,000 in 1985 to more than 2 million in 1993. The National Science Foundation leads an effort to outline a new internet architecture that would support the burgeoning commercial use of the network.
1994: Netscape Communications is born. Microsoft creates a Web browser for Windows 95.
1994: Yahoo! is created by Jerry Yang and David Filo, two electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University. The site was originally called Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. The company was later incorporated in March 1995.
1995: Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy begin to provide internet access. Amazon.com, Craigslist and eBay go live. The original NSFNET backbone is decommissioned as the internet’s transformation to a commercial enterprise is largely completed.
1995: The first online dating site, Match.com, launches.
1996: The browser war, primarily between the two major players Microsoft and Netscape, heats up. CNET buys tv.com for $15,000.
1996: A 3D animation dubbed ‘The Dancing Baby’ becomes one of the first viral videos.
1997: Netflix is founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as a company that sends users DVDs by mail.
1997: PC makers can remove or hide Microsoft’s internet software on new versions of Windows 95, thanks to a settlement with the Justice Department. Netscape announces that its browser will be free.
1998: The Google search engine is born, changing the way users engage with the internet.
1998: The Internet Protocol version 6 introduced, to allow for future growth of Internet Addresses. The current most widely used protocol is version 4. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses allowing for 4.3 billion unique addresses; IPv6, with 128-bit addresses, will allow 3.4 x 1038 unique addresses, or 340 trillion trillion trillion.
1999: AOL buys Netscape. Peer-to-peer file sharing becomes a reality as Napster arrives on the Internet, much to the displeasure of the music industry.
2000–2010:
2000: The dot-com bubble bursts. Websites such as Yahoo! and eBay are hit by a large-scale denial of service attack, highlighting the vulnerability of the Internet. AOL merges with Time Warner
2001: A federal judge shuts down Napster, ruling that it must find a way to stop users from sharing copyrighted material before it can go back online.
2003: The SQL Slammer worm spread worldwide in just 10 minutes. Myspace, Skype and the Safari Web browser debut.
2003: The blog publishing platform WordPress is launched.
2004: Facebook goes online and the era of social networking begins. Mozilla unveils the Mozilla Firefox browser.
2005: YouTube.com launches. The social news site Reddit is also founded.
2006: AOL changes its business model, offering most services for free and relying on advertising to generate revenue. The Internet Governance Forum meets for the first time.
2006: Twitter launches. The company's founder, Jack Dorsey, sends out the very first tweet: "just setting up my twttr."
2009: The internet marks its 40th anniversary.
2010–2020:
2010: Facebook reaches 400 million active users.
2010: The social media sites Pinterest and Instagram are launched.
2011: Twitter and Facebook play a large role in the Middle East revolts.
2012: President Barack Obama's administration announces its opposition to major parts of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, which would have enacted broad new rules requiring internet service providers to police copyrighted content. The successful push to stop the bill, involving technology companies such as Google and nonprofit organizations including Wikipedia and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is considered a victory for sites such as YouTube that depend on user-generated content, as well as "fair use" on the internet.
2013: Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, reveals that the NSA had in place a monitoring program capable of tapping the communications of thousands of people, including U.S. citizens.
2013: Fifty-one percent of U.S. adults report that they bank online, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.
2015: Instagram, the photo-sharing site, reaches 400 million users, outpacing Twitter, which would go on to reach 316 million users by the middle of the same year.
2016: Google unveils Google Assistant, a voice-activated personal assistant program, marking the entry of the internet giant into the "smart" computerised assistant marketplace. Google joins Amazon's Alexa, Siri from Apple, and Cortana from Microsoft.
2018: There is a significant rise in internet-enabled devices. An increase in the Internet of Things (IoT) sees around seven billion devices by the end of the year.
2019: Fifth–generation (5G) networks are launched, enabling speedier internet connection on some wireless devices.
2020–2022:
2021: By January 2021, there are 4.66 billion people connected to the internet. This is more than half of the global population.
2022: Low–Earth orbit satellite internet is closer to reality. By early January 2022, SpaceX launches more than 1,900 Starlink satellites overall. The constellation is now providing broadband service in select areas around the world.
