Internet and World Wide Web II

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

ARPANET.

The Internet originated as an experimental communication system funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and hosted by several universities. Its impetus was a defense experiment to create a cost-efficient, decentralized, widely distributed electronic communications network for linking research centers. This network was named Arpanet, after its sponsoring agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Arpanet began operating in 1969, but it took several years before it became reliable, thanks to packet switching (breaking information into small manageable pieces that could each be routed separately and reassembled at the receiving computer), and acquired familiar functions like electronic mail. Arpanet's first international links were established in 1973, when hosts in Great Britain and Norway signed on.

EARLY COMMERCIAL NETWORKS.

The Internet's first commercial forebear was called Telenet and was run by Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN), a defense contractor with close ties to the Arpanet project. Introduced in 1974, Telenet enjoyed only a lukewarm reception and its founders couldn't keep up with the steep level of investment needed to make it truly commercially viable. Five years later BBN sold Telenet Communications Corp., by then a publicly traded company, to General Telephone & Electronics, better known as the telecommunications company GTE Corp. GTE would eventually spin Telenet off in a joint venture that formed US Sprint, the long-distance and networking giant, but Telenet never became a dominant player. More important were the originally closed (proprietary, non-Internet) networks of CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online, which would provide the commercial model for consumer Internet service providers (ISPs) and Web content centers, and large commercial network backbone operators, which would give businesses fast access to the Internet and eventually take over the Internet's operation.

EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN INTERNET.

Despite its relative obscurity at the time, the 1980s were the Internet's most defining years. By the early 1980s Arpanet had adopted the TCP/IP communications standards that would become commonplace on the Internet, and more importantly, other interconnected research networks began to spring up, both within the United States and abroad. One of the most important was the National Science Foundation's NSFNET, which came online in the mid-1980s to link several supercomputing laboratories with U.S. universities. In this period the collective network was increasingly known as the Internet, although the generic term of internetworking, or connecting networks to other networks, had existed since at least the mid-1970s. Enjoying rapid growth and technical upgrading, the NSF's network became the official backbone of the Internet by the late 1980s, eclipsing Arpanet, which by that time was comparatively small, slow, and outmoded. From just 213 host computers on Arpanet in 1981, the Internet had burgeoned to include some 10,000 hosts by 1987, and topped 300,000 by 1990, the year Arpanet was officially decommissioned.

WORLD WIDE WEB.

The final major breakthrough of the 1980s—and one that would decidedly set the course for the 1990s and beyond—was a 1989 proposal at the Swiss physics lab CERN to create a World Wide Web. The idea came from Tim Berners-Lee, a British-born physicist working at CERN at the time. His plan, which was not well received initially, was to allow colleagues at laboratories around the world to share information through a simple hypertext system of linked documents. Eventually gaining CERN's approval, Berners-Lee and others at the research center began developing the now familiar standards for the Web: hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) to delineate how servers and browsers would communicate; hypertext mark up language (HTML) to encode documents with addressed links to other documents; and a uniform resource locator (URL) format for addressing Internet resources (e.g., http://www.cern.ch or mailto:webmaster@domain.com). By 1990, Berners-Lee had likewise created the first Web browser and server software to feed information to the browser.

Although Berners-Lee's vision was for a collaborative, informal medium of information exchange, perhaps that typified in chat rooms and newsgroups and whiteboard applications, more commercially motivated Web innovations soon followed. Most important was Marc Andreessen's Mosaic browser, which he developed as an undergraduate employee at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Mosaic, which debuted in early 1993, was more graphical and user friendly than other Web applications up to that point. It was an instant success, albeit not a money maker because it was mostly distributed for free. Andreessen finished his degree in computer science later that year, and in early 1994 established Netscape Communications Corp. with Silicon Valley titan Jim Barksdale, founder of the high-end computer hardware maker Silicon Graphics. Netscape's Navigator quickly became the dominant browser on the Internet, at one point claiming 75 percent of all users. Curiously, the NCSA claimed rights to Mosaic and wrangled with Andreessen over the commercial use of the browser application code and its name; the NCSA would later license Mosaic to Microsoft Corp. to use in a competing browser, enabling the software giant to outmaneuver Netscape within a couple years with its Internet Explorer product. By this time the Web was nearly synonymous with the Internet.

As the browser wars fed on the phenomenal public interest in the Internet in the mid-1990s, the network became a predominantly commercial entity, as businesses set up Internet sites in droves and millions of new users—both private individuals and corporate users—began logging on. The NSF officially bowed out of running the Internet backbone in 1995, when commercial operators took over; however, the NSF continued its policies of funding research into advanced networking applications that could improve the Internet and newer high-speed research networks.