The Internet was invented in the United States during the late 1950s to the 1970s by a group of researchers and scientists at the newly formed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) after the former Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Realizing that the United States had suffered a great technological blow by allowing the USSR to hold the first successful satellite launch, ARPA set out to create a brand new technology unlike anything that had ever been done before; and the Internet was the result of their hard work.[1]
The idea of Internet was led out by
J.C.R. Licklider in his 1960 paper about computer networking. Licklider became head of information processing at the U.S.
military's research agency ARPA (later to become known as DARPA) a couple of years later.[2]
In 1958 the concerns of people in the US military triggered the creation of the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
DARPA's initial role was to jump start American research in technology, find safeguards against a space-based missile attack and to reclaim the technological lead from the USSR. After only 18 months after the creation of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had developed and deployed the first US satellite. DARPA went on to have a direct contribution to the
development of the Internet by appointing Joseph Licklider to head the new
Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO).[3]
In October, 1962, Licklider was hired by
Jack Ruina as Director of the newly established IPTO within DARPA, with a mandate to interconnect the United States Department of Defense's main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the
Pentagon, and SAC HQ. There he formed an informal group within DARPA to further computer research. He began by writing memos describing a distributed network to the IPTO staff, whom he called "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network". As part of the information processing office's role, three network terminals had been installed: one for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley and one for the Compatible Time-Sharing System project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Licklider's identified need for inter-networking would be made obvious by the apparent waste of resources this caused.
Although he left the IPTO in 1964, five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his vision of universal networking that provided the impetus that led his successors such as Lawrence Roberts and Robert Taylor to further the ARPANET development.[4]
In the 1980s, ARPANET was handed over to a separate new military network, the Defense Data Network, and NSFNET, a network of scientific and academic computers funded by the National Science Foundation. In 1995,
NSFNet in turn began a phased withdrawal to turn the backbone of the Internet (called vBNS) over to a consortium of commercial backbone providers (PSINet, UUNET,ANS/AOL, Sprint, MCI, and AGIS-Net99).[5]
The first networking protocol used on the ARPANET was the Network Control Program. In 1983, it was replaced with the TCP/IP protocol invented Wby Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, and others, which quickly became the most widely used network protocol in the world.
In 1990, the ARPANET was retired and transferred to the NSFNET. The NSFNET was soon connected to the CSNET, which linked Universities around North America, and then to the EUnet, which connected research facilities in Europe. Thanks in part to the NSF's enlightened management, and fueled by the popularity of the web, the use of the Internet exploded after 1990, causing the US Government to transfer management to independent organizations starting in 1995.[6]
[1] Who invented the Internet?
www.tech-faq.com/who-invented-the-internet.html
[2] When was the Internet invented?
www.ehow.com › ... › Internet Networking
[3]
wiki.answers.com/.../What_is_some_information_about_the_invention_of_the_internt
[4]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
[5] What is ARPANET?
searchnetworking.techtarget.com/.../0,,sid7_gci213782,00.html
[6] Internet History
www.livinginternet.com/i/ii.htm
Also see … An anecdotal history of the people and communities that brought about the Internet and the Web at
www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html
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