Chapter 11

The History of the Internet

Early Internet Early Internet

Subsections of The History of the Internet

The History of the Internet (Part 1)

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Video Script

In this module, we’re going to talk about the history of the Internet. The history of the internet is a very interesting topic in computer science. But I think it’s one that we don’t think about very often today, we just take the internet for granted and just know that it’s always there. So let’s take a look at where the internet came from. The internet was really built to solve a unique problem.

Networking is complicated. And in the early days of computer networking, the only way two computers could talk to each other was via a direct connection between those systems, much like the phone systems of the olden days. And so we’ve already seen some network connected computers such as the NLS system that Douglas Engelbart talked about, for example. But networking was really complicated. And so because of this, we had to have direct connections. And it was very slow and very tedious to have really powerful computer networks. We ran into problems that were very similar to the tyranny of numbers problem that we talked about in an earlier Module. So the internet was really created to solve that particular problem.

One of the visionaries of the creation of the internet was J.C.R. Licklider. Licklider was a computer scientist at the defense, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. And he was interested in how we could build computer systems to aid the work of his agency. And so his work was really around some of the earliest networked computers such as ones at MIT in Santa Monica. But the real frustration he had was each one of those computer systems required a different terminal and different commands to interact with it. And J.C.R. Licklider really dreamed of having just one computer terminal on his desk, and one set of commands that he had to memorize. And from that terminal, he could access any computer system nationwide to get the information that he needed. And so he really famously talked about this and came up with some really interesting ideas. Let’s take a look at a video of J.C.R. Licklider talking about his ideas For what became the internet.

The History of the Internet (Part 2)

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J. C. R. Licklider his idea inspired him to write a paper in 1962 titled Man Computer Symbiosis. And in that paper, he had this quote, that he foresaw a network of such computers connected to one another by wideband communication lines, which could provide the functions of present day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval, and other symbiotic functions. And while there’s a lot of words here, he’s really thinking about building computer connections where computers can store libraries worth of information that we can access at our fingertips.

And so a few years later, he started talking with his colleagues. And he came up with this idea of what he called the intergalactic computer network, which I really admit I wish we called the internet the intergalactic computer network, I think is a really catchy idea. But he envisioned this idea of a global network of computers all interconnected and accessible to each other. And so you can easily ask access data from data and programs from any of those computers on any other computer. And he actually even submitted a memorandum called a memorandum for members and affiliates of the intergalactic computer network to encourage people to participate in this new idea. And while this never really came to be, this idea of forms the basis of a lot of the internet and cloud computing resources that we use today in our daily lives.

Another major figure in the history of the internet is Leonard Kleinrock. Leonard Kleinrock was a major figure in the history of the internet and was a researcher at UCLA. And he helped develop the technology behind packet switched networking, which we will take a look at in the next lecture. And it was really developed and proposed to the government as a way to build computer systems that were very fault tolerant in case of an attack or an emergency. His work was really revolutionary. And there’s actually a great video of Leonard Kleinrock himself discussing the importance of his work at UCLA in the early days of these computer networks. So let’s take a look at that video.

The first Internet connection, with UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock

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The History of the Internet (Part 3)

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On October 29, 1969, the first message was transmitted across the newly created ARPANET between computers at UCLA and SRI, the Stanford Research Institute. And so in this particular picture, we see the notes from Leonard Kleinrock notebook taken on October 29, 1969, showing that they talked to SRI hosts to host and it was really revolutionary moment on the internet. Because this was the first instance of a packet switch network being used that now forms the basis of the internet. Of course, it wasn’t exactly a success. They tried to transmit the word login, but only got the letters L o before the system crashed. So it wasn’t exactly a huge success, but it was a very small step toward the creation of the internet.

And so with that, ARPANET was born, ARPANET was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, and it was really the first computer network of its kind in the United States. Connecting all sorts of research areas together. Above me is a picture of the ARPANET map from March 1977, showing several hosts all connected to the network and all the different ways that they talk to each other. It was originally started as a packet switch network of just four different sites that were connected to these devices called interface message processors, or IPS, which are really modern, early precursors to what a modern router does, taking the messages from a computer and translating it so that it can be sent over a packet switch network.

Of course, ARPANET wasn’t the only network at that time. As we saw in the video at the beginning of this module, there are many different networks created all across the world. For example, with ARPANET by the 1970s, there were sometimes 20 new hosts coming online every day, you had the National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain, you had merits, the Michigan Educational Research Information Triad. You had supply days in France, and then you had the proliferation of public networks such as X25, and Usenet. Which were all public networks that were available through telephone providers at that time.

But all these different networks were disconnected you really couldn’t get from one network to the other network. And so we needed something else to really build the modern internet that we use today. And so that comes from the work of Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, who were two engineers for ARPANET. And they began working in the 1970s for a way that we could connect all of these computer systems together using a similar technology. And so their work really led to the creation of what we call TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol, which is the underlying technology for most computer networks today. And their work was so revolutionary that the two of them received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. So let’s take a quick look as Vinton Cerf talks a little bit about the history of the internet and around the birth of the modern internet that we know today.

Internet History part 4: Vint Cerf on the Birth of the Internet in 1983

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The History of the Internet (Part 4)

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The technology that Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn developed is the transmission control protocol or TCP. TCP allows small networks to talk to each other using a common standard or protocol that determines how they actually interact. The biggest benefit of TCP is there’s no single point of failure in the system. They’re not all talking to a central hub, each computer can talk point to point or host a host and pass the packets along as needed to the next system. And the other important thing about TCP is computers could also acknowledge successful transmission or if the transmission wasn’t received, but expected it could request to retransmit all of that missing data, making the system very robust against errors. And so because of that data transmission was very tolerant of any errors and any lost data.

By 1985 small networks had started to connect to each other and larger networks. Were starting to connect all using this TCP network. Work. And so most of the network computers were using TCP by 1985. And there’s a real big push to bring more computers onto the internet. Every few years there were these interconnectivity conferences where small network owners were encouraged to adopt TCP so they could connect to the internet as it was growing. But unfortunately, there really wasn’t much out there. At that time, there were computer systems available, but there wasn’t any way to just publicly access information on those systems.

So we really needed one more piece to make the internet into the useful information sharing tool that we know today. The last piece of the puzzle is the creation of the world wide web. The World Wide Web is the interconnected web of webpages that we use today that most of us think of as the internet. And the World Wide Web actually debuted on this very system and next cube from 1990 that makes up the very first web server. And this technology was all developed by one man, Tim Berners-Lee, Tim Berners-Lee was an engineer at CERN in Europe, and in the 1980s. He was really interested in creating a way that they can better present information on the internet. CERN had a lot of research that they wanted to share. And they needed a way to make it available to the general public.

So over the next few years, he worked on creating all of the underlying technologies needed to build his vision of the world wide web, including the web browser, the web server, the Hypertext Markup Language, and the hypertext transfer protocol, HTTP, all very core technologies to what we do on the internet today. And so with the development of the World Wide Web, you had personal computers that started to get computer browsers such as mosaic installed on it. This is one of the early web browsers showing what the World Wide Web looked like in the early 1990s. And so mosaic is built on this idea of the hypertext transfer protocol. It’s a protocol for sending and requesting data from the servers connected on the internet’s and so with the work of Tim Berners-Lee had the creation of the first web server, the first web browser and all together they may up the World Wide Web. So let’s take a quick look at a video interviewing Tim Berners-Lee as the World Wide Web turned 25 in the year 2015 and just get some thoughts of his experience developing the World Wide Web in the last 25 years.

World Wide Web Turns 25: Interview with inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee

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The History of the Internet (Part 5)

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In the previous video we saw mosaic as an example of one of the first web browsers. It’s really credited with bringing a large number of people to the web because they could easily install it on their personal computers at home. Mosaic was eventually sold to eventually became Netscape Navigator, which was then sold to a new company called Mozilla, and rebranded as Mozilla Firefox. So in a way you can think of mosaic being the early ancestor to Mozilla Firefox. Lynx was another popular text based web browser at the time, and it was actually co-developed at the University of Kansas, so it’s pretty close to home.

Another one of the earliest web browsers was line mode. Line mode was really the first widely used web browser of its time, and CERN actually brought it back for the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. So if you go to the URL shown on this slide, you can actually browse the web as it looked in the early days in the early 1990s. So next, we move on to the later part. of the world wide web development, which is the rise of the commercial web from 1996 to 1999. As the World Wide Web grew larger and more popular, companies started to take notice and figure out how they could use the World Wide Web to connect new customers make their businesses well known. And eventually they figured out how to sell things on the internet. So for example, this screenshot is from Tiger Direct, which is a computer parts sales website. And this is the very first website that you can find for Tiger Direct using the Wayback Machine to see what it looked like in the early days. And so not only did TigerDirect have early webpages, but Apple computers was there.

And you saw the development of some companies that we have today, such as Amazon, that leads to the era known as the Dot com boom from 1999 to 2001. This graph actually shows the stock market during that time and you can see it peaked right around 2000 before there was a huge crash into 2002 and 2003. So what happened is the internet really had some unprecedented growth from 1999 to 2001. And venture capitalists started investing in companies that really believe they would be the next big thing. In theory with the Dot Com Boom, they thought that if you spent a lot of money up front, then eventually you’d figure out ways to make money down the road. Unfortunately, that really didn’t work out as well as everyone thought, and many companies went bankrupt within a couple of years.

There were some survivors, of course. But let’s take a look at some real sobering statistics from the Dot com bust just to show you exactly what’s going on here. Infospace was a really big company in the early days of the World Wide Web and its stock price peaked at 1,300 a share in March 2000. By June 2002. It was down all the way to 2.67 cents, the learning company which was an early computer software company, to behind things such as the Oregon Trail and the common San Diego video games. It was bought for three and a half million dollars in 1999 but sold for just 27 million a year later. Another early product on the worldwide web was geo cities. One of the first places where you could host your own website on the web kind of like WordPress and Tumblr are today, Geo Cities was purchased by Yahoo for 3.5 billion dollars in 1999. But it was officially closed about 10 years later at a total loss. Of course, from the ashes of the Dot Com Bubble rises the internet that we know today.

And the big thing we can think about that has changed the world wide web over the last 20 years is the rise of what we call web 2.0 and social media. With web 2.0. The focus is instead of a very few users knowing how to develop web pages, we have the creation of web content from the masses itself. Think about websites such as Wikipedia, but even Facebook and YouTube where a lot of the content is being generated by users such as you and I. You also have the rise of ubiquitous internet access. You don’t have to To be at a computer in a home anymore, or go to the library to access the internet, almost all of us carry around smart devices that we can access the internet at a moment’s notice. And we have access pretty much anywhere we go in the modern world today. Because of this, we’ve had the rise of mobile devices, and the easy access to data that we never thought it was even possible then. But of course, we’ve also had other things happen, such as the rise of search engines, the power of search engines, such as Google can’t be understated. In short, if Google doesn’t know about it, it’s really hard to find it on the internet. And so because of that, we can still be limited in the scope of things that we can see on the internet.

But with all of that today, the internet and the World Wide Web is a really core part of what we do as computer scientists and how we interact as humans today. And so I hope this video was really interesting in giving you some background and what the history of the internet looks like. In the next module, we’ll spend a little bit more time talking about the technologies to make the internet and the World Wide Web possible, as we know it today.

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Last modified by: Russell Feldhausen Aug 10, 2023