The Internet

Have you ever asked yourself: Who owns the Internet?

A brief history of the Internet

Origins | The Internet |The Web |

Pre-history

History

Finally ... the Internet

1948 - Claude Shannon lays the foundations of the Theory of Communication; and Norbert Wiener invents cybernetics, the science that studies the interrelation between man and machine, expressing his ideas in his work "Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine".

1957 - The USSR successfully launches the first satellite, the Sputnik. As a result the USA responds by funding the ARPA so as to make up for the technological gap in the military sector.

1962 - Based on Professor John MCarthy's innovation in computing, the time-sharing system, that supplanted the batch-processing system, it was now possible for more than one programmer to use the same computer, thus enhancing greatly the computing power of the machine.

1963 - Paul Baran publishes his article "On Distributed Coomunicatin Network" and designs the basic architecture of a wide-area network. The concept of packet switching is developed.

1965 - A number of studies on "cooperative networks of time-sharing computers" start to shift the focus from military to academic purposes.

1968 - The ARPA builds the Arpanet, the forefather of the Internet.

1969 - The Arpanet set up four nodes in the United States: they are situated at the universities of Los Angeles (UCLA), Santa Barbara, Utah and Stanford, using the NCP protocol. The e-mail and the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) are invented.

1974 - Vint Cerf and Bob Hahn publish their article on the TCP/IP protocols, that are still in use today.

1976 - The mailing list is invented.

1981 - Many universities that cannot access the Arpanet create the Csnet. Arpanet becomes the backbone of the net, and many LANs connect to it through gateways, and the same do other large networks.

1982 - For the first time the general structure of the world networks connected together is called the Internet.

1983 - The US military creates its own network, Milinet, and dismisses the Arpanet, which becomes an indipendent network.
Nsfnet is set up by the National Science Foundation in America for academic purposes; and Fidonet also is created by amateur individuals, soon to become very popular among the general public (not so general however, because using the net in those years was rather complicated and required good scomputer skills).

1984 - To assign names to the computers connected to the Internet, the DNS (Domain Name Servers) protocol in created.
1,000 hosts are connected to the net.

1986 - Over 10,000 host computers conencted.

1988 - The IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is invented by the Finnish Oikarinen: this is the beginning of the so-called chat-on-line programs, whose performance was greatly improved in later years thanks to Java applets.

1989 - First commercial Internet provider, Compuserve.
For the first time Italy connects to Nsfnet, and so to the Internet.

1990 - Arpanet is finally dismissed. The first browsers are invented (Archie).

1992 - Tim Berners-Lee (together with Robert Cailliau), a researcher at CERN in Geneva, releases the first version of the World Wide Web, the multimedia hypertext system based on the client/server technology. The World Wide Web really picked up when an American student invented a program called Mosaic, which made the Web navigable by a click of the mouse.
There are now 1 million hosts in the net.

1993 - Newspapers and the media in general start talking about the Internet and thus it becomes a mass phenomenon.

1994 - Companies and individuals start to create websites.
Some data: 20,000 networks connected; 3 million host computers; about 30 million users.

 1995 - The WWW sites are the most visited in the Internet.

1996 - Using Java and VRML languages, the WWW can now implement special visual effects and animations on websites.