How did the Internet start?

Mention the history of the Internet to a group of people, and chances are someone will make a snarky comment about Al Gore claiming to have invented it. Gore actually said that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet" [source: CNN]. He promoted the Internet's development both as a senator and as vice president of the United States. So how did the Internet really get started? Believe it or not, it all began with a satellite.
It was 1957 when the then Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. Americans were shocked by the news. The Cold War was at its peak, and the United States and the Soviet Union considered each other enemies. If the Soviet Union could launch a satellite into space, it was possible it could launch a missile at North America.

Why did Internet start ?

The Internet started out as an american military project its original purpose was to enable different military bases and later academic centers to communicate with each other, and share information without the need to travel. It was started in the 1960's and at first used very complex protocols , which were later standarized by the introduction of the WWW we use today, and the Http protocols along with the e-mail services, at later points Internet introduced data sharing and the ability of video streaming, which along side the high speed internet that is used in more countries each day starts to provide a form of entertainment,another ground breaking invention for the internet was the ability to instantly communicate with anyone around the world, which was developed by first creating forums and later on instant chat messangers ,culminating in the now popular social networks that are a hybrid between a chat,mail and forum services , providing also streamed videos. The internet is sharing information and its INFORMATION its a storage of all kinda information. Internet is also communication its a line for sharing information and creating new information that can be shared with everybody around the globe its the bibble of the new era. Internet has information to offer and everything that was either banned, removed remains un-used. Everything produced outside the so called entertainment industry ( like anime or Internet animation) and its also a new form of society that is connected to sharing different kinda of data ...its a second spiritual,introverted and matriarchal society that takes it upon itself to archivize the human civilisation and its own existence storing it for future generations.

Where did Internet start ?

The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France.^[1] The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET (which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol). The first message was sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock's laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
Packet switching networks such as ARPANET, NPL network, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols.^[2] Donald Davies was the first to put theory into practice by designing a packet-switched network at the National Physics Laboratory in the UK, the first of its kind in the world and the cornerstone for UK research for almost two decades.^[3][4] Following, ARPANET further led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.
Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the very late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990,^[5] and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
In the 1980s, the work of British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web theorised protocols linking hypertext documents into a working system, marking the beginning of the modern Internet.^[6] Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.^[7] Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.

When did internet happen ?

20 years ago today, the World Wide Web opened to the public

Today is a significant day in the history of the Internet. On 6 August 1991, exactly twenty years ago, the World Wide Web became publicly available. Its creator, the now internationally known Tim Berners-Lee, posted a short summary of the project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup and gave birth to a new technology which would fundamentally change the world as we knew it.
The World Wide Web has its foundation in work that Berners-Lee did in the 1980s at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He had been looking for a way for physicists to share information around the world without all using the same types of hardware and software. This culminated in his 1989 paper proposing ‘A large hypertext database with typed links’.

While the initial proposal failed to gain much momentum within CERN, it was later expanded into a more concrete document proposing a World Wide Web of documents, connected via hypertext links. World Wide Web was adopted as the project’s name following rejected possibilities such as ‘The Mine of Information’ and ‘The Information Mesh‘. The May 1990 proposal described the concept of the Web as thus:

HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, HyperText provides a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help. We propose the implementation of a simple scheme to incorporate several different servers of machine-stored information already available at CERN, including an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments.

The document envisaged the Web as being used for a variety of purposes, such as “document registration, on-line help, project documentation, news schemes and so on.” However, British Berners-Lee and his collaborator Robert Cailliau, a Belgian engineer and computer scientist, had the foresight to avoid being too specific about its potential uses.
In 1990, working on a computer built by NeXT, the firm Steve Jobs launched after being pushed out of Apple in the mid-80s, Berners-Lee developed the first Web browser software called, fittingly, WorldWideWeb. By the end of that year he had a working prototype of the Web running on a server at CERN.

On 6 August 1991, the World Wide Web went live to the world. There was no fanfare in the global press. In fact, most people around the world didn’t even know what the Internet was. Even if they did, the revolution the Web ushered in was still but a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. Instead, the launch was marked by way of a short post from Berners-Lee on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, which is archived to this day on Google Groups.

The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.
The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.

The post explained how to download the browser and suggested users begin by trying Berners-Lee’s first public Web page, at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
Although that page is no longer available, a later version from the following year is archived here. It acted as a beginner’s guide to this new technology.

The evolution of the Web

From here on, things began developing rapidly for the Web. The first image was uploaded in 1992, with Berners-Lee choosing a picture of French parodic rock group Les Horribles Cernettes.

In 1993, it was announced by CERN that the World Wide Web was free for everyone to use and develop, with no fees payable – a key factor in the transformational impact it would soon have on the world.
While a number of browser applications were developed during the first two years of the Web, it was Mosaic which arguably had the most impact. It was launched in 1993 and by the end of that year was available for Unix, the Commodore Amiga, Windows and Mac OS. The first browser to be freely available and accessible to the public, it inspired the birth of the first commercial browser, Netscape Navigator, while Mosaic’s technology went on to form the basis of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
The growth of easy-to-use Web browsers coincided with the growth of the commercial ISP business, with companies like Compuserve bringing increasing numbers of people from outside the scientific community on to the Web – and that was the start of the Web we know today.
What was initially a network of static HTML documents has become a constantly changing and evolving information organism, powered by a wide range of technologies, from database systems like PHP and ASP that can display data dynamically, to streaming media and pages that can be updated in real-time. Plugins like Flash have expanded our expectations of what the Web can offer, while HTML itself has evolved to the point where its latest version can handle video natively.
The Web has become a part of our everyday lives – something we access at home, on the move, on our phones and on TV. It’s changed the way we communicate and has been a key factor in the way the Internet has transformed the global economy and societies around the world. Sir Tim Berners-Lee has earned his knighthood a thousand times over, and the decision of CERN to make the Web completely open has been perhaps its greatest gift to the world.

The future of the Web

So, where does the Web go from here? Where will it be in twenty more years? The Semantic Web will see metadata, designed to be read by machines rather than humans, become a more important part of the online experience. Tim Berners-Lee coined this term, describing it as “A web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines,” – a ‘giant global graph’ of linked data which will allow apps to automatically create new meaning from all the information out there.

What is Internet ?

The Internet, sometimes called simply "the Net," is a worldwide system of computer networks - a network of networks in which users at any one computer can, if they have permission, get information from any other computer (and sometimes talk directly to users at other computers). It was conceived by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. government in 1969 and was first known as the ARPANet. The original aim was to create a network that would allow users of a research computer at one university to "talk to" research computers at other universities. A side benefit of ARPANet's design was that, because messages could be routed or rerouted in more than one direction, the network could continue to function even if parts of it were destroyed in the event of a military attack or other disaster.

Today, the Internet is a public, cooperative and self-sustaining facility accessible to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Physically, the Internet uses a portion of the total resources of the currently existing public telecommunication networks. Technically, what distinguishes the Internet is its use of a set of protocols called TCP/IP (for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Two recent adaptations of Internet technology, the intranet and the extranet, also make use of the TCP/IP protocol.

For most Internet users, electronic mail (email) practically replaced the postal service for short written transactions. People communicate over the Internet in a number of other ways including  Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Internet telephony, instant messaging, video chat or social media. 

The most widely used part of the Internet is the World Wide Web (often abbreviated "WWW" or called "the Web"). Its outstanding feature is hypertext, a method of instant cross-referencing. In most Web sites, certain words or phrases appear in text of a different color than the rest; often this text is also underlined. When you select one of these words or phrases, you will be transferred to the site or page that is relevant to this word or phrase. Sometimes there are buttons, images, or portions of images that are "clickable." If you move the pointer over a spot on a Web site and the pointer changes into a hand, this indicates that you can click and be transferred to another site.

Using the Web, you have access to billions of pages of information. Web browsing is done with a Web browser, the most popular of which are Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. The appearance of a particular Web site may vary slightly depending on the browser you use. Also, later versions of a particular browser are able to render more "bells and whistles" such as animation, virtual reality, sound, and music files, than earlier versions.

The Internet has continued to grow and evolve over the years of its existence. IPv6, for example, was designed to anticipate enormous future expansion in the number of available IP addresses. In a related development, the Internet of Things (IoT) is the burgeoning environment in which almost any entity or object can be provided with a unique identifier and the ability to transfer data automatically over the Internet.

Who created the Internet?

It still boggles my mind that, 10 years after poor Al Gore kinda sorta lost a crucial presidential election, I still hear the same joke reverberating down the hallways of history. “Hey look at me. I’m Al Gore. I invented the Internets.”
Everyone laughs, of course, because the idea of one person creating something as vast as the Internet is patently ridiculous.
The fact that Gore never made any such claim usually gets overlooked in the hilarity.
In serious discussions about the Internet’s origins, computer scientists Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee usually receive the honors, for their work at DARPA and the foundation of the World Wide Web Foundation, respectively.
They obviously deserve the recognition they receive for their genuinely world-changing work. However, the Internet is a highly conceptual invention, as much cultural construct as technological breakthrough. It wouldn’t be possible without political support, infrastructure, funding, maintenance, and an unbelievable amount of incredibly hard work. Without the concept, though, we couldn’t even manage to put the first two building blocks in place.
So who deserves the credit?

Jules Verne, of course.....

That’s right, one of the two true fathers of science fiction first conceived of a vast network of home communication/ information machines in 1863, well over a hundred years before the concept of the computer was popularized. The man who came up with the concept of submarine warfare, lunar travel, and heavier-than-air flight is also one of the inventors of information technology. There wasn’t even a word for “information technology,” but there it is. It was his second novel.
The telephone wouldn’t even be patented for another 13 years. Vannevar Bush, one of IT’s great visionaries, wouldn’t even conceive of the Memex—the conceptual model for the PC—until 1945.
There’s literally no analogy I can come up with that does this justice, but I’ll make one up anyway. It’s like a caveman seeing a maple seed and thinking “Oh crap! Sikorsky S-67 Blackhawk attack helicopters!”
It gets even weirder of course.
The novel wasn’t a hit. In fact, it wasn’t even published until 1994, which is to say five years after Tim Berners-Lee officially created the World Wide Web. Jules Verne in
vented the internet and no one knew about it for 131 years. What the crap?
Here’s the sad story. Verne wasn’t an established novelist yet, and his publisher refused the text out of hand, saying that it could ruin Verne’s reputation. His first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, was a fanciful and somewhat trendy adventure. Paris in the 20th Century, in contrast, was a dark and brooding novel about the death of culture, financial ruin, ecological disaster, and essentially the death of all hope. The death of all hope is less than marketable.
Boops.
Adding insult to injury, though, Verne’s publisher also said that the book was “too unbelievable.” Keeping in mind that Verne would not establish his trope of speculative fiction that borders on prophecy for years, here’s a nice short list of other things he predicted in this one unpublished novel alone:

• Skyscrapers
• Mechanical Calculators
• Air conditioning (which, by the way, changed the world in its own right)
• High-speed rail travel
• The electric chair
• The automobile (The invention that defined America in the latter 20th century)
• Television

Also: The mass production of culture, the current academic Humanities crisis, manmade ecological crisis (think Global Warming), the “greed is good” philosophy that defined the 1980s… and the Internet. All in one single novel generally considered as one of his less important works.
Holy crow.
The real story of Verne’s success is that he didn’t give up.
It’s hard to imagine the strength it took for a young man to ignore an experienced editor’s opinion and keep chasing the seemingly impossible images inside his own head. Somehow, Verne wasn’t discouraged by this early rejection, and instead knew where his true creative strengths lay. Verne somehow managed to define his career not as a writer of banal adventures, but instead as one of the founders of speculative fiction. It’s astounding to think that Jules Verne’s prescience extended even to the future of his own writing, his own self—the very things that even the most perceptive among us are usually blind to.
As a result, Verne didn’t just invent the internet—he kept on inventing and predicting and prophesying for the rest of his life.
Verne died in 1905.
He lived to see the Wright Brothers make their first flight. Everything else mentioned above was still waiting decades past his future.

Internet

Introduction

The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location. The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and development of information infrastructure. Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the government, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new technology. Today, terms like "computer.org" and "http://www.xxxx.com" trip lightly off the tongue of the random person on the street.
This is intended to be a brief, necessarily cursory and incomplete history. Much material currently exists about the Internet, covering history, technology, and usage. A trip to almost any bookstore will find shelves of material written about the Internet.
In this paper,several of us involved in the development and evolution of the Internet share our views of its origins and history. This history revolves around four distinct aspects. There is the technological evolution that began with early research on packet switching and the ARPANET (and related technologies), and where current research continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as scale, performance, and higher-level functionality. There is the operations and management aspect of a global and complex operational infrastructure. There is the social aspect, which resulted in a broad community of Internauts working together to create and evolve the technology. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting in an extremely effective transition of research results into a broadly deployed and available information infrastructure.
The Internet today is a widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of what is often called the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure. Its history is complex and involves many aspects - technological, organizational, and community. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use of online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community operations.

 

Five Ws

The Five Ws, Five Ws and one H, 5W1H, or the Six Ws are questions whose answers are considered basic in information-gathering or problem-solving. 

• Who did that?
• What happened?
• When did it take place?
• Where did it take place?
• Why did that happen?

Some authors add a sixth question, “how”, to the list, though "how" can also be covered by "what", "when", or "where"^:

• How did it happen?