INTERNET HISTORY & USEFULNESS

Internet History & Usefulness

Internet History & Usefulness

History of Internet

The Internet is an extremely flexible and rapidly evolving communication infrastructure. Most researchers are struggling with the challenge of understanding the significance of the Internet for our present and future life. The aim of this contribution is different: The main focus is on the history and evolution of the Internet up until now. Like various other complex technologies, the Internet was not a single innovation and not invented in one day by a single individual. This entry presents a few of the key events and key developments in this history (Hill & John, 1998).

It is not easy to distinguish phases in Internet history, which is due to the fact, that many development processes were taking place in parallel and had neither a clear beginning nor a specific culminating point or end. Nevertheless, the determination of phases is helpful to highlight key trends and structure the long list of facts and figures in a systematic way. For the sake of simplicity, then, three main phases can be distinguished in the Internet's history: a military, an academic, and a commercial phase that are separated by key events (Alesso & Smith, 2008).

Military Phase: The ARPA-NET (1969-1985)

In the beginning of the Internet, military aims and resources were of crucial importance. In retrospect, the triggering event lies back in the cold war. In 1957, the Soviet Union successfully developed and launched the first artificial satellite (named Sputnik). This led to the so-called Sputnik crisis, involving the sudden awareness of the United States that the Soviets were technologically more advanced and capable to launch intercontinental missiles. As a reaction to that crisis, military spending for research and development increased to cope with this technological challenge. In 1958, various new institutional bodies created, including not only the National Aeronautics and Space Administration but also the less well-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency within the U.S. Department of Defense (Alesso & Smith, 2008).

This agency was a longtime sponsor of the main predecessor of the modern Internet, called the ARPA-Net (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Net). Several other key events marked this first phase of the Internet. In 1972, e-mail was invented by Ray Tomlinson, working for BBN Corporation. In 1973, an open protocol was created that allows access of any computer to the Internet, named TCP/IP and developed by Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. In ...