It’s in 1957, when the Soviet Union (federal state with communist regime) sends a satellite in space, that the idea of a network is born. Indeed, this event worries the American President Dwight Eisenhower on the real intentions of the Soviet Union. He took the control and asked scientists to imagine a defense system to store computers in ultra-secure places and to link them together.
The great history of the Internet then takes shape.
In 1969, a small group of researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) succeeded in sending a message from one computer to another. Two huge electronic computers, ancestors of our PCs, exchanged, for the first time in history, data by packets through a simple copper cable of a dozen meters.
They were working together on the same network called Arpanet, a network located in Stanford, Santa Barbara (California) and in Utah, financed by the research services of the American army (DARPA). These machines connected were to form a « decentralized » network, in which none of them were clients or servers. Initially used for military purposes, this network quickly became the main topic of researchers and journalists who were already imagining the future of these networks.
Two years later, the first electronic mail (also called e-mail) was sent and computers from other countries could connect to the network and exchange information.
In 1989, due to the increasing number of computers on the network, the states agreed to adopt the same communication rules. As a result, the TCP/IP protocol, named after the first two protocols, was created, and used for data transfer. This is how the name of the Internet came about at the European Nuclear Research Center, from the contraction: Inter-networks, meaning « between networks ». The British researcher named Tim Berners-Lee invented the various systems intended to simplify the use of TCP/IP, in particular the address and URL and the html language. Arpanet quickly spread to universities and then became used in the commercial sphere as well.
As time went by, personal computers entered the family sphere and projects multiplied to link them together as well.
Two years later, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, intended for the public. He had the idea of storing documents in a place that everyone could access whenever they wanted. The documents will no longer be sent to one or more recipients but made available to them on a server. The « web » was born. It spreads little by little, as personal computers and communication networks progress (telephone lines, search engines, Wi-Fi connection.).
The great history of internet : today, more than 4.5 billion people on the planet are Internet users.
If you want to see more information about the history of internet go have a look on : https://www.internetsociety.org/fr/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/
You can also take a look on my other article : https://digital-froggies.com/blog106/archives/86
