History of the Intenet

The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s.
Initial concepts of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the
United States, United Kingdom, and France. The US Department of Defense awarded contracts
as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET.
The first message was sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard
Kleinrock's laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network
node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
Packet switching networks such as ARPANET, NPL network, CYCLADES, Merit
Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety
of communications protocols. Donald Davies first designed a packet-switched network at
the National Physics Laboratory in the UK, which became a testbed for UK research for almost
two decades. The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in
which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.
Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF)
funded the Computer Science Network(CSNET). In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP)
was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the early 1980s the
NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and
provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access
to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations.
Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the very late 1980s. The
ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by
officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990, and the
NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet
to carry commercial traffic.
In the 1980s, research at CERN in Switzerland by British computer scientist Tim Berners-
Lee resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system,
accessible from any node on the network. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a
revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology, including the rise of near-instant
communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion
forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education
community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF's very high speed
Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of
data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s,
10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost
instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-
way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97%
of the telecommunicated information by 2007. Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by
ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.
The Victorian Internet
The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers is a
1998 book by Tom Standage. The book was first published in September 1998 through Walker &
Company and discusses the development and uses of the electric telegraph during the second half
of the 19th century and some of the similarities the telegraph shared with the Internet of the late
20th century.
The central idea of the book posits that of these two technologies, it was the telegraph that was
the more significant, since the ability to communicate globally at all in real-time was a
qualitative shift, while the change brought on by the modern Internet was merely a quantitative
shift according to Standage.

Top 10 Pioneers Of The Internet

The Internet wasn’t just designed by one person or one team at one time. As more and more
people peeled back the frontiers of information technology, they contributed to the understanding
and development of what we all now take for granted. The Internet is here to stay, but there were
times when it was a fragile thing that only a few people could envision. The following people
are visionaries, inventors, researchers and programmers who, in the early days of the internet,
dreamed big and pioneered the technologies and programs behind all the standard Internet
operating tools of today.

10. Claude Shannonannon

Known as “the father of modern information theory,”

Claude Shannon published an influential paper in 1948,
“A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which
formalized the study of communication channels. By
establishing limits on the efficiency of communication
and presenting a challenge to find codes to improve
efficiency, Shannon developed the basic foundation
underlying the Internet.
9. Paul Baranan

While researching survivable communication networks at

RAND Corporation in 1959, Baran developed and described the
data architecture for a packet-switched communications
network. This description, detailed in a series of papers called
“On Distributed Communications,” would prove to be the
general basis behind the architecture of the Internet.

8. Bob Tayloror

In the late 1960s, Bob Taylor convinced the Defense

Department to develop a communications network, which
would eventually become ARPANet, the military precursor to
the Internet. He wrote an influential paper, “The Computer as
a Communication Device,” which stated that men would soon
be able to communicate more efficiently through a computer
than face-to-face. The paper laid out the future of what the
Internet would become.

7. Douglas Englebartbart

A researcher at Stanford, Englebart’s Augmentation Research Center

was the second node on ARPANet in October 1969. He developed
the Network Information Center at Stanford, which would later
become the domain name registry, or the database listing every
website on the Internet. It is interesting to note that Sergey Brin and
Larry Page, the developers of Google, also went to Stanford nearly 30
years later.
6. Larry Robertsrts

Chief scientist at ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office

in 1966, he led the development of ARPANet. He also founded
Telenet, the first packet-switched network provider and the
precursor to companies like Comcast and Verizon. Telenet is now
owned by Sprint and is part of its mobile data network.

5. Vint Cerf

A legend in the early Internet community, Cerf was program

manager for ARPA from 1976-1982. He co-designed the TCP/IP
protocols used by the early ARPANet and today’s Internet with
Bob Kahn, and he founded both the Internet Society and ICANN, or
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN
is a fundamental part of how the Internet is organized.

4. Paul Mockapetris

Along with Jon Postel, Mockapetris designed and developed DNS, or the
domain name architecture. When you type a website address into your
search bar, you can thank Mockapetris and Postel for figuring out how to
make that action find the website you want.
3. David Clark

The Internet grew tremendously between 1981 and 1989, and the
decisions made then affected what the network would later
become. Clark was the chief protocol architect for the Internet
during this time as the chairman of the Internet Activities Board,
and he exerted significant influence in the formation of
the rules governing the Internet.

2. Steve Wolff

As the Division Director for Networking and Communications at

the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1986, Steve Wolff
managed the development of NSFNet, one of the precursors to the
Internet. He conceived and led the Gigabit Testbed, a joint project
between the NSF and the Department of Defense designed to
prove that networking at gigabit speeds was possible. His success
helped pave the way to transform the Internet from a narrowly-
focused communications network into the globally reaching
Internet of today.

1. Marc Andreesen & Eric Bina

It took these two pioneers to develop Mosaic, the first Internet

browser. They took all the previous pioneers’ accomplishments and
translated it into an easy-to-use graphical interface. This went a long way toward transforming
the Internet from a province for highly-educated computer scientists into a network for anyone to
view.

These are just a few of the pioneers who made the Internet possible. Each individual who
developed a better way of transmitting information, organizing data flows or increasing speeds
contributed in some way to the development of the Internet we know today.

Web Broswer
A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for retrieving,
presenting and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information
resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI/URL) that may be a web page,
image, video or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to
navigate their browsers to related resources.
Although browsers are primarily intended to use the World Wide Web, they can also be used to
access information provided by web servers in private networks or files in file systems.
The most popular web browsers are Chrome, Edge (preceded by Internet
Explorer),Safari, Opera and Firefox.

Function
The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user ("retrieval"
or "fetching"), allowing them to view the information ("display", "rendering"), and then access
other information ("navigation", "following links").
This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), for
example http://en.wikipedia.org/, into the browser. The prefix of the URL, the Uniform Resource
Identifier or URI, determines how the URL will be interpreted. The most commonly used kind of
URI starts with http: and identifies a resource to be retrieved over the Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such
as https: for HTTPS, ftp: for the File Transfer Protocol, and file: for local files. Prefixes that the
web browser cannot directly handle are often handed off to another application entirely. For
example, mailto: URIs are usually passed to the user's default e-mail application,
and news: URIs are passed to the user's default newsgroup reader.
In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser
will display it. HTML and associated content (image files, formatting information such as CSS,
etc.) is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an interactive
document, a process known as "rendering". Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally
display any kind of content that can be part of a web page. Most browsers can display images,
audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java
applets. Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded
rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user to save the file to disk.
Information resources may contain hyperlinks to other information resources. Each link contains
the URI of a resource to go to. When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the resource
indicated by the link's target URI, and the process of bringing content to the user begins again.