Internet - the history of the global network

Internet has realized what in the 1970's a visionary of the communications Marshall McLuhan referred to as the "Global Village". The Internet is simply described as the worldwide intersection of separate networks maneuvered by government, business, academic circles, and private parties. In the beginning the Internet was introduced to interrelate laboratories and offices occupied in government and military research. Since 1994 it has been expanded to serve millions of users and a multitude of purposes in all parts of the world.

In a few years, the Internet has merged itself as a very influential stage that has altered the way we commercialize, and associate with others. The Internet, has given an intercontinental or a "Globalized" aspect to the world. It has developed into a worldwide source of knowledge for innumerable people, at home, at school, and at work.

Originally, the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) was created by the US in 1958 as an aftermath to the launching of USSR’s Sputnik. ARPA made way for the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) whose purpose was to interconnect the US military computers at the Pentagon, and other government offices.                

In 1965 the IPTO, started a project to create a network that gave the idea of packet switching. This technique paved the way for Resource Sharing Computer Networks which was officialized and accepted in June 1968 and laid the basis for the instigation of the working ARPANET the following year. There were by the end of 1971, fifteen sites linked to the premature ARPANET. The ARPANET used the Network Control Program (NCP), employing host-to-host junction and exchanging levels of the protocol stack. To answer the network's swift advancement, as more and more locations connected, TCP protocols were introduced during 1973.

The term "Internet" to define a single global TCP/IP network was invented in December 1974. The earliest TCP/IP-based wide-area network was operational by 1 January 1983, when all systems on the ARPANET were transferred from the previous NCP protocols. The flexibility of TCP/IP to adjust to current communication networks permitted for fast development.


The accessibility of the requirements and reference code allowed business industry to create interoperable network modules, such as routers, making original and consistent network equipment accessible from many corporations. This helped in the instant increase of the Internet and the propagation of local-area networking. It propagated the extensive administration and meticulous adaptation of TCP/IP on UNIX and virtually every other common operating system.


The essential resources and principles that made the Internet feasible were assembled for about two decades. The network later put on a public face in the 1990s. In 1989, an initially prominent web browser was ViolaWWW, created using the X Window System. It was later on substituted by the Mosaic web browser. By late 1994 there appeared to be an increased public awareness in the earlier academic, technical Internet. By 1996 the Internet had become widespread, and as a result, so had its use as an expression in reference to the World Wide Web.


Through the decade, the Internet effectively welcomed most of earlier individual computer networks. By the end of 1990s, it was calculated that traffic on the public Internet increased by 100 percent annually, and the average yearly increase in the quantity of Internet consumers was anticipated to be around 20% and 50%. This growth is mainly credited to no central authority, which permits organic growth of the network, along the non-proprietary open quality of the Internet protocols, which supports vendor interoperability and stops any one group from applying surplus power over the network. As of end of March this year, the calculated quantity of Internet consumers was about 2.095 billion (30.2% of world population).