Forty Years of the Internet: How the World Changed for Ever

Nowadays, one cannot imagine life without the Internet. Arguably, the web is as revolutionary and ground-breaking invention as things like a printing press, the telegraph, or even the very technology of writing. Thanks to the Internet, billions of people across all over the world can communicate with each other, search for different kinds of information, work, and buy goods by merely using their PCs, Macs, or smartphones.  Although such global popularity and integrity of the Internet largely take its roots from the edge of the 20th and 21st centuries, this technology is much older than one may think. In reality, the web is more than 40 years old, and some technological advancements and ideas, which eventually led to its creation are even older. To help you to investigate the fascinating history of the Internet, our WriteMyEssayOnline team have collected a bunch of exciting facts about the web. The earliest years 1. One may track the Internet to as early as 1957. On that year, the United States Department of Defense decided to establish an Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in response to the USSR’s launch of the first spacecraft satellite. The main goal of ARPA was to create new projects in science and technology to obtain superiority over their potential foreign competitors. 2. In the early 1960s, the web was born on paper. It started from the United States Air Force request to create technology, which would allow protecting and transferring crucial data in the conditions of a possible nuclear war. In 1962, such a task became theoretically possible. In particular, J. C. R. Licklider of MIT introduced a concept for a global computer network. In the same year, Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation designed a method of dividing information into blocks, which could be sent separately from one computer to another. ARPA was highly interested in both ideas, so the agency invested in them, creating the ARPANET project in 1968. From the ARPANET to the Internet 3. In 1971, the ARPANET was nothing but a network, which connected 23 mini-computers within different universities and research facilities in the USA. In such a way, the network allowed sharing pieces of information regardless of the distance between its users. Two years later, England and Norway were connected to the ARPANET, which now became the first international network. 4. Following the ARPANET, several other computer networks were created in the 1970s. Still, since they used different protocols, each of them can be perceived as a separate system. For instance, Ethernet, developed by Robert Metcalfe connected computers via cables while Tim Truscott and Steve Bellovin invented USENET, a network, which works via a dial-up phone connection. Still, in 1973, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which aimed at linking multiple networks together. Next year, in their notes regarding TCP, Kahn and Cerf coined the term “Internet.” 5. In 1983, the ARPANET connected about 500 hosts, primarily universities and research facilities. At the same time, dial-up networks introduced email communication and became available in most developed countries. With the growing amount of users and different purposes for the network use, there was a need for creating a convenient and efficient way to help the users to find particular information. To address this issue, scholars of the University of Wisconsin created the Domain Name System (DNS), which is still widely used. The first steps towards global access 6. By the mid-1980s, different computer networks were used by many universities across the USA and Europe for research, education, and communication purposes. Similarly, some large companies started to investigate ways of...
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