A brief history of the Internet

The Internet was born about 30 years ago, out of an effort to connect together a U.S. Defense Department network called the ARPAnet and other various radio and satellite networks. The ARPAnet was an experimental network designed to support military research. In time, the US was able to develop a working network (the ancestor of our current Internet), and the academic and research users who had access to it were soon addicted.

At about the same time as the Internet was coming into being, Ethernet local area networks (LANs) were developed. LAN technology matured quietly until roughly 1983, when desktop workstations became available and local networking exploded. This created a new demand: rather than connection to a single large timesharing computer per site, organizations wanted to connect their entire LAN to access ARPAnet. This would allow all the computers on the LAN to access ARPAnet facilities. In addition, many companies and organizations started building private networks using the same communication protocols as the ARPAnet: namely, IP and it relates. It became obvious that if these networks could talk together, users on one network could also communicate and everyone would benefit.

Today, what comprises the Internet is a difficult question; the answer changes over time. Ten years ago the answer would have been easy: All the networks, using the Internet Protocol (IP), which cooperate to form a seamless network for this collective users.

To send a message on a network, a computer simply had to put its data in an envelope, called an Internet Protocol (IP) packet, and "address" the packets correctly. The communicating computers -- not the network itself -- were also given the responsibility for ensuring that the communication was accomplished. The philosophy was that every computer on the network could talk, as a peer, with any other computer. This would include various federal networks, a set of regional networks, campus networks, and some foreign networks.

More recently, some non-IP-based networks saw the overwhelming benefits of the Internet technology and wanted to provide its services to their clients. So they developed methods of connecting these 'strange' networks (e.g., BITNET, DECnets, etc.) to the Internet. At first these connections, called gateways, merely served to transfer electronic mail between the two networks. Today, many have grown to translate into other services between the networks, which include: New Standard Protocols, International Connections, Commercialization, and Privatization. Back to the Top

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