The Internet, as a global network-of-networks is the end product of several decades of research and development in the field of computer networking. Below is a brief description of just a few of the concepts and networks that helped to lead to the modern Internet.
Early Wide Area Networks
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the first conceptual WAN (Wide Area Network) were developed and a few were implemented.
One of the earliest computerised networks to operate over a wide area was the SABRE (Semi-Automated Business Research Environment) ticketing system developed by IBM for American Airlines. Development on the SABRE project began in 1957, with the first experimental system going online in 1960. With further development, SABRE took over all ticketing for American Airlines in 1964. Today, this system is still in operation (Wikipedia, 2007).
A major development was the conceptual Galactic Network, envisaged by J.C.R. Licklider in 1962. He proposed the creation of a system allowing computers anywhere in the world, to share resources and information, accessible from any site. His ideas formed the basis of ARPANET and of the modern Internet. (Licklider et al. 1968)
ARPANET
By the mid 1960s time-sharing computer systems were starting to appear and these could be accessed through remote terminals. However, to work with different systems, multiple terminals were required. Robert W. Taylor said in an interview with the New York Times:
“There was one other trigger that turned me to the ARPAnet. For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them.
I said, oh, man, it’s obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet.” (Markoff, 1999)
The creation of ARPANET beginning in 1968 marked the creation of the first inter-net – a network of networks. ARPANET served as the predecessor to the modern Internet by serving as the platform for development many technologies, some of which went on to become a pivotal part of the modern Internet and a few technologies have driven major social change in the way communications are conducted (Leiner et al., 1999).
A Brief History of ARPANET
The core concept of ARPANET was that of packet-switching – information transmitted across the network was broken into small pieces, transmitted individually, then recombined at the destination.
Up until this time all telecommunications and computer networks were circuit-switched – where an electrical circuit was created for the entire connection. Packet-switching enabled multiple users to share a single physical connection drastically increasing the efficiency of the computer networks.
ARPANET was developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a consortium of American universities and the technology company Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN).
ARPANET was first activated on October 29, 1969 with a connection between the University of California, Los Angeles and Stanford University. Although the first attempt to log-into the system resulted in a system crash, the second attempt proved to those involved the potential of the concept (Leiner et al., 1999).
By September 1971, the network had spread to the east coast of the United States, incorporated two satellite links – to Hawaii and Norway – and a cable link joined London to the fledgling Internet.
In 1983 the military sections of ARPANET were split off into the MILNET (Military Network), leaving 45 networks connected. Also in this year, the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) developed by Vinton Cerf, became the only allowable protocol for use on ARPANET (Leiner et al., 1999).
ARPANET was ultimately shut down with the activation of NSFNet in 1986, which was ultimately decommissioned in 1995 with the formation of the Internet.