Internet’s Worldwide History

By the end of the decade 1950, at the height of the Cold War between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, the U.S. Defense Department began to worry about what could happen with their national communication system if a nuclear war would break out. One of the most important weapons in a war is communications and it is one of the first targets that the enemy will try to destroy.

In 1962 a U.S. government researcher, Paul Baran, presented a project solving the question set out by the Defense Department. In this project, Baran proponed a communications system through computers connected in a decentralized network, in such a way that if one of the several important nodes was destroyed, the other nodes could communicate between them, without any inconvenience.

This project was discussed for several years and finally in 1969, the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), created the first computer network that was knows as the ARPAnet.

In the first stage there were only four computers connected to the network: the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB), and University of Utah.

In 1971 11 more nodes had been added, and by 1972 there were a total of 40 computers connected to the network.

That same year, facing the need of establishing a common communication protocol between computers and operational systems of different type (for example IBM and Unisys) to communicate between themselves without any inconvenience, the Inter Networking Working Group was created with scientific and technical researchers specialized in different disciplines.

In 1974 the researchers Vint Cerf, of Stanford University, and Robert Kahn, of BBN, drafted a document A Protocol for PacketNertwork Internetworking, where it is explained how to solve the communication problem between the different types of computers; these ideas began to be applied in a limited manner in 1978.

In 1982 this solution was implemented in its totality, and was known as Transmition Control Protocol - Internet Protocol (TCP-IP). As of this year the word Internet began to be used.

This protocol was adopted as Standard by the U.S. Defense Department for its computer network, and this organism decided its separation from ARPAnet and the creation of a new network of its own known as MILnet.

Around the middle 80s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) decides that a high performance work network is necessary for 5 centers that had supercomputers and in this way give access to the researchers that were found in different U.S. cities.

In 1987 the NSF creates the NSFnet that connected 7 networks with the 5 centers with the supercomputers previously mentioned. With this new network, the speed of the transference between the different nodes was increased to 1,5 Megabytes per seconds. Up to them, the speed of transference, between nodes, was 56 kilobytes per seconds.

Other Data:

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the first email message. What he wrote in that message nobody exactly knows, but the word says that it was something like: “This is a test. or 1, 2, 3, testing “(Tomlinson did not register what he wrote).

The second message Tomlinson sent it to the computers that were connected to the network where he was running the tests, and in this one he announced the creation of the Email and explained how to send messages to other network users, applying the sign @ (arroba) after the name that the user used to get connected to the network.

In 1990 the work network that gave origin to Internet, ARPAnet, stopped working. The greatest Internet center in Europe was CERN, Nuclear Research European Center (Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, in French). In that organism, in 1992, Tim Berners Lee (currently director of the World Wide Web Consortium), creates the World Wide Web, using three new resources: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and a customer program known as Web Browser. Al this work was based on Ted Nelson’s document, in which, for the first time in 1974, Hypertexts and links were mentioned.

In 1993, in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), in the University of Illinois, Mac Andreessen together with a group of students create a program known as Mosaic (Web Browser), which became famous very quickly. Mac Andreessen, a few while afterwards, walked Hawai from NCSA and together with Jim Clark organized Netscape, which was one of the mostly used programs in Internet in its peak.

Around the middle of 1993 there were only 100 information sites registered by the World Wide Web (www) protocol. Nowadays its millions of web sites that are registered worldwide, and thousands more keep appearing each day.

In 1994 RACSA begins to commercially offer the Internet service in Costa Rica. To see in detail RACSA’s Internet history in Costa Rica, click here

History of RACSA’s Internet service in Costa Rica

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