A Very Brief History of the Internet

The concepts that lead to the development of the Internet can be traced back almost 40 years to
academic papers written in the early 1960s on "packet-switching" networks. In 1969 these ideas
matured into a working proto-network called the ARPANET. Although this network had only four
"nodes" or computers connected together, it was the forerunner of today's Internet.

By 1971, 15 universities and research institutions were connected together, and the system was
upgraded to handle a seemingly large 64-node network. In 1973 the first European computers
were connected in England and Norway.

Meanwhile the key technologies of Ethernet, telnet, ftp, and Unix were being invented in the early
1970s. Ethernet (invented by Bob Metcalf, who later founded 3Com) would later become the
standard for local area networks. Telnet allowed remote interactive access to other computers.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) enabled the transfer of large data files over the network.
Unix, invented appropriately enough by the "phone company" (Bell Labs) and enhanced at UC
Berkeley, became the software backbone of the Internet. Later Sun Microsystems
commercialized Unix.

The dominant use of the Internet in the 1970s was email. In 1979 Usenet was invented to carry
discussion forums, a primitive form of today's chat rooms. This was the beginning of the more
public side of the Internet, as contrasted to private email and telnet sessions. Usenet would later
grow to its present volume of more 10,000 separate topic areas and more than 10 gigabytes of
data - that's the equivalent information of a small public library - that is accessed every day.
Sexual topics quickly became the largest volume single area of Usenet. Communication and discussion of human sexuality has continued to be an important use of the Internet to this day.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the Internet grew exponentially: the number of hosts in 1984
was 1000, in 1987 10,000, in 1989 100,000, and in 1992 the number of hosts, or computers with permanent IP addresses, surpassed the one million mark - and this doesn't even count the millions
of people who dial in to the Internet daily via modems.

In 1993, Mosaic, the precursor to the Netscape browser, took the world by storm and gave birth
to what is now known as the World Wide Web. And the rest, as they say, is history. Today the
Internet links more than 170 countries worldwide, with over 1.5 million domain names, and over
40 million hosts. Underscoring the new central role of the Internet in American life--and indeed
the entire world, a three-judge Federal panel in Philadelphia in June of 1996 called the Internet
"the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country - and indeed the world --
has yet seen." ("A Very Brief History of the Internet" was written courtesy of Dr. Jim Herriot)

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