We explain everything about the history of the Internet, its timeline and the origin of the World Wide Web. Also, the dotcom bubble.
The history of the Internet
Today we all know what the Internet is, to the point that entire generations can no longer imagine a world devoid of this great global communications network, whose history is quite recent.
The first antecedent of the Internet was telecommunications whose first modern representative is the telegraph of the late 19th century. On the other hand, The invention of computers was also necessary whose first actual copies were calculating machines created for war purposes during World War II.
So thanks to many discoveries and inventions, In the middle of the 20th century, the first ideas regarding communications networks appeared (and later, computer networks).
The first mention of a computerized social interconnection, under the concept of networking (networking), comes from a series of memos by the American Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915-1990), nicknamed “Lick”, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the United States. In these memos, dated August 1962, “Lick” argued in favor of what he called the “Galactic Network.”
Modest computer networks existed in the 1950s and 1960s dedicated to airport reservation systems (SABRE) and defense and military control systems (AUTODIN I). Furthermore, by the 1960s, computer manufacturers had incorporated semiconductor technology into their products.
Thus new ways of managing time and resources were born, allowing large computers to “serve” different users at the same time, in a way so fast and efficient that it gave the impression of being dedicated to each one of them exclusively. From there came the idea of having “guest” computers (hosts) and servers (servers).
One of the first multipurpose computer systems was ARPANET emerged in 1969, a military project of the United States Department of Defense. This system connected different users on the computers of the different universities in the country. At the head of this project was Joseph Licklider himself.
That is why it became essential to create communication protocols that would allow such different computers to “speak” the same language, so to speak.
In 1973 ARPANET and NORSAR (a Norwegian computer network for the detection of earthquakes and nuclear explosions) began to exchange computerized information, just before Great Britain also joined the project. Finally, the need for common communication protocols led to the birth of TCP/IP protocols in 1982.
During the 1980s, the Internet slowly grew and opened to the commercial world although still under criteria that are not very clear. ARPANET continued to grow and connect with other foreign networks around the world, separating itself from its military powers in the process, until its closure in the early 1990s.
Then, another similar project of the American National Science Foundation absorbed the old ARPANET, to create NSFNET, the great network of scientists and universities. This is the embryo of what we know today as the Internet, which in 1990 already had 100,000 servers in the world.
The term “Internet” was proposed in the 1990s as an acronym for Interconnected Networks (interconnected networks), but there are also those who interpret it as International NET (international network).
See also: History of the computer
Birth of the World Wide Web (WWW)
The World Wide Web, known at the time as the “worldwide web”, It was an invention of the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee (1955-) and the Belgian Robert Cailliau (1947-), who worked at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research).
It responded to the need to devise a system for retrieving the enormous amount of information available on the then nascent Internet, linking logical information and textual content programmed in “tags” that, later, an interpreter program was capable of “reading” and displaying the information.
This is how the first programs capable of doing so emerged, called “search engines” or browsersand which today we know as “browsers”. The first browser was Mosaic, created in 1993 created by the American Marc Andreesen, the same man who would later create the first commercial browser, Netscape.
These types of programs were key to the spread of the Internet, its use by non-specialized users, and therefore its global reach that we know today.
The dotcom bubble
It was known as the dotcom bubble or the dotcom bubble to a period of enormous financial growth of Western companies linked to the Internet and of the then called “new economy”.
This boom It occurred between 1997 and 2001 and was characterized by the massive emergence of new companies linked to the digital sector, known as companies dotcom (term from their Internet domains, ending in .com). Many of them had spectacular bankruptcies throughout this period, especially when the bubble burst at the beginning of the new century.
The so-called “dotcom bubble crisis” was predicted by many investors from its inception, in part due to the volatility of the financial market, which on stock exchanges such as New York registered a price above 5000 points in March of the year. 2000.
However, in October 2002 it registered 1,300 points, even less than it originally had in 1996. During that period, Between 2000 and 2003, around 4,850 companies linked to the Internet disappeared due to bankruptcy or having been absorbed by stronger ones.
Internet history timeline
The following is an ordered chronology of major events in Internet history:
- 1958 – The first modem capable of transmitting data over a telephone line is created at BELL laboratories.
- 1964 – First conference on the ARPANET project.
- 1969 – Leonard Kleinrock, proponent of packet switching theory since 1961, connects the first 4 American university computers.
- 1971 – ARPANET now covers 23 computers in the United States. Roy Thompson sends the first email in history.
- 1973 – Great Britain and Norway connect with ARPANET.
- 1974 – Vint Cerf and Bob Khan use the term “Internet” for the first time.
- 1976 – Coaxial cables are invented, which will give a great boost to the digital connection.
- 1978 – The first unsolicited email message (SPAM) is sent to 600 ARPANET users.
- 1982 – TCP/IP protocols are introduced to the network.
- 1984 – The network has around 1000 computers connected.
- 1989 – The network has around 100,000 computers connected.
- 1990 – Closure of ARPANET and emergence of the commercial Internet.
- 1991 – Public launch of the World Wide Web.
- 1992 – The network has around 1,000,000 computers connected.
- 1993 – The first browser, NCSA Mosaic, appears.
- 1994 – Founding of Yahoo and its search engine, Lycos. Geocities appears, one of the first online communities on the network.
- 1995 – Launch of Microsoft Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
- 1996 – The network has around 10,000,000 computers connected. The first cell phone with network access appears, the Nokia 9000 Communicator.
- 1998 – Google is born and becomes the largest online search engine.
- 1999 – Blogs become popular in the online community, especially after the launch of Blogger.com.
- 2000 – Rumors of financial collapse spread due to the Y2k phenomenon, according to which computers would date everything back to 1900. Nothing happens.
- 2001 – The dotcom bubble bursts.
- 2003 – The largest online encyclopedia appears: Wikipedia, and the first social network itself: MySpace.
- 2004 – Google announces its email service: Gmail. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook and started the “boom” of social networks.
- 2005 – YouTube is founded.
- 2008 – The first participation in elections via the Internet in the United States is celebrated.
- 2016 – The implementation of the most recent web protocol, IPv6, begins, replacing the IPv4 in force since its implementation in 1983 in the ARPANET.
Continue with: Generations of computers
References
- “History of the Internet” on Wikipedia.
- “History of the Internet” at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain).
- “Who invented the Internet?” on History.com.
- “History of the Internet” (video) by Melih Bilgil on Picolsigns.
- “Internet (computer network)” in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
