THE HISTORY OF INTERNET 1

THE HISTORY OF INTERNET

RONGO UNIVERSITY

CAT 1

Student’s Name OKONDA MAHWA JOSEPHAT

Reg No. CHE/016/2014

Lecturer’s Name PROFESSOR NICKSON AMWAMU

Course Title INTERNET APPLICATION

Course Code COM 222

Date 2ND OCTOBER, 2017

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THE INVENTION OF INTERNET

Internet was the result of years of collaboration among computer scientists, researchers and engineers. No
single person invented the Internet. Technology experts cite various government agencies — as well as a handful of
individuals — that have played an instrumental role in creating what we know today as the Internet. The Internet as
we know it really got started in the early 1960s. That was when J.C.R. Licklider — a computer scientist with
technology company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) — formulated a few unique ideas about global networking in
a series of memos, describing an "Intergalactic Computer Network."

THE OWNER OF INTERNET

No one actually owns the Internet, and no single person or organization controls the Internet in its entirety.
The Internet is more of a concept than an actual tangible entity, and it relies on a physical infrastructure that connects
networks to other networks. What we’re paying for is not the internet itself, but rather the infrastructure through which
it's delivered. We give money to internet service providers, who help to direct the traffic from the networks to the
people. If the internet was a city, ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - would be the
entity responsible for giving everyone an address. ICANN is responsible for making sure that every domain name
links to the correct IP address, but they don't own the internet either.

WHO CONTROLS THE INTERNET

To target the control of the internet, upon declaring internet access a basic human right, the UN stressed the
need to empower women and girls through digital interventions. It highlighted the importance of doing the following;

 Enhancing their access to Information & Communications Technology (ICT)

 Promoting digital literacy

 Promoting the participation of women and girls in education and training on ICT

 Encouraging women and girls to embark on careers in Sciences and ICT

Network Neutrality is the principle according to which Internet traffic shall be treated equally, without
discrimination, restriction or interference regardless of its sender, recipient, type or content, so that Internet users’
freedom of choice is not restricted by favouring or disfavouring the transmission of Internet traffic associated with
particular content, services, applications, or devices.

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INTERNET PROGRESS GROWTH AND PROGRESS

Credit for the initial concept that developed into the World Wide Web is typically given to Leonard
Kleinrock. In 1961, he wrote about ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, in a paper entitled "Information Flow
in Large Communication Nets." Kleinrock, along with other innovators such as J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of
the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO), provided the backbone for the ubiquitous stream of emails,
media, Facebook postings and tweets that are now shared online every day. Here, then, is a brief history of the
Internet’s evolution:

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 Centre, 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.

1972: BBN’s Ray Tomlinson introduces network email. The Internetworking 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.

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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.

1983: The Domain Name System (DNS) establishes the familiar .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int system for
naming websites.

1984: William Gibson, author of "Neuromancer," is the first to use the term "cyberspace."

1985: Symbolics.com, the website for Symbolic 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: Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, the European Organization 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 popularized.

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.

1994: Netscape Communications is born. Microsoft creates a Web browser for Windows 95.

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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. 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.

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: The dot-com bubble bursts. Web sites 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.

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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
twitter."

2009: The Internet marks its 40th anniversary.

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 non-profit 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" computerized assistant marketplace. Google joins Amazon's Alexa, Siri from Apple, and
Cortana from Microsoft

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2017: As of June 2017, 51% of the world's population is on internet. The International Telecommunication Union
estimated about 3.2 billion people, or almost half of the world's population, would be online by the end of the year. Of
them, about 2 billion would be from developing countries, including 89 million from least developed countries.

REASON WHY INTERNET IS USED WIDELY

1st Reason, to be a part of society.

Being a social part is a necessary need and even obligation of every human. To be such one we need to follow the
technologies development. And exactly the Internet favours this fact as nothing else does.

2nd Reason, to get information they need.

Going to the libraries or to different bookstores is no longer popular as at least several years ago because now it will
be expensive to buy a book, and very time consuming as it is easier to download and to look through the article you
need in the Internet by using Google. Just by several clicks people can reach the data from every corner of the world.

3rd Reason, to communicate with each other.

Communicating through social network became a normal thing, and to say more now you can have friends all over the
world and share valuable knowledge and experience both you and they gained. Mostly, communication is done
through Skype or ICQ, and visiting popular social networks as Facebook, Gmail, Rambler, Yahoo and much more.

4th Reason, to relax and to have fun.

Sometimes people don’t need any reasons for connecting to the Internet. It is just for fun looking at different sites
according to our interests. We play games, downloading fun software or listen to the music that means that we try to
entertain ourselves with the modern technologies’ help.

5th Reason. To watch movies, to read books etc.

Nowadays we got used to that fact that we can find any program or movie put in the Internet. There are plenty of
specially created websites, which allow downloading for free or for some fee.