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History of the Internet
Overview
What is now the internet began a few decades ago. Computers used by military
began to communicate with one another, and their techie masters sent electronic
mail along with the communication packets that could travel over telephone lines.
Educational institutions developed their own computer centers, and communicated
with the military, and other educational institutions. Again, humans were hanging
their own mail onto the machine data being transferred. There are limits to
how much machines can say to other machines, but humans can out communicate
machines any day... and those little packets of email transfered with data became
big packets, then bigger packets, and still bigger packets of electronic mail.
Electronic Mail grew from those early packets. The military built Arpanet and
made the connections deliberately complicated to provide security for national
communications case of nuclear attack. Bitnet was the educational network that
began linking up universities. FredMail linked up computers in K-12 schools
in California with software that transferred the precious packets by night.
Bulletin boards began to flourish in urban centers and with hobbyists. The Cold
War kept the routing complex, even as the number of users and what they used
it for mushroomed. As education and commercial networks developed, they pulled
in disabled community giving new life and hope to homebound and bed-ridden folks.
Originally, electronic mail was sent from one individual to another. Collaborations
emerged, and the technology to group folks with common interests were begun.
The UUnet Usenet Newsgroups were some of the earliest Electronic Discussions.
Newsgroups still exist, and in fact encompass many more subject areas than before.
You can find a Usenet Newsgroup to discuss almost anything.
As the Bitnet software developed, Mailing List Discussion Groups were formed
usually on university networks that could subscribed to by anyone with an electronic
mail account. Although the topics tend to have more decorum than topics inthe
newsgroups, there are many parallel topics, and many Mailing Lists are also
piped out to the Newsgroups.
As fast as communications among users of the Newsgroups and Mailing list became,
and as stable and predictible as the networks became, the users wants more.
They wanted graphics. They wanted point and click. They wanted music and video.
They wanted live chats. Today, all this and more make up the
World Wide Web also known as the Internet.
Page created November 26, 2007. Anne Pemberton. Updated Tuesday, March 9, 2010 .AP
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