A brief history of the Internet

The internet is a global interconnection of computer networks that communicates

resources through protocols. The internet is part of our everyday lives. Most of us cannot live
without internet(me). I will write on how the internet came to be.
In the midst of the cold war, October 4 1957, the Soviet had launched the first manmade
satellite into space, Sputnik. The Americans were scared and saw this as a threat. They later
created an agency named ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency). It was a defense
department research project for scientist and researchers to communicate, share information and
knowledge. When they wanted to share information, they had to use telephone lines. It was ok
for phone calls but difficult for computers. Using this method, you could only send data as a full
packet that is; only to one computer at a time. It was common for information to get lost and to
have to restart the procedure from the beginning. The answer was packet switching.
It was a simple and efficient method of transferring data instead of sending data
as one big stream, it cuts it up into pieces then it breaks down the packet of information into
blocks and forwards them as fast as possible to their destination.
Now our devices are designed so that they can connect to the wider global
network automatically. But back then, this process was a complex task. For the early day at
ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network), it still lacked a common language
for computers outside its own network to be able to communicate with computers on its own
network. To build an open network of networks, a general protocol was needed, that is a set of
rules. In 1978, the transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) was created.
When a user sends or receives information the first step is for TCP on the
sender’s machine to break that data into packets and distribute them. Those packets travel from
router to router over the internet.
During this time the IP protocol is in charge of the addressing and
forwarding of those packets. At the end, TCP reassembles the packets to their original state.

Alexandra Didieye