Evolution & Trajectory of Internet

The vast, global internet of today had rather humble origins when it initiated. In 1969, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed an experimental network called ARPAnet to link together four supercomputing centres for military research. This network had the many and difficult design requirements that it had to be fast, reliable, and capable of withstanding a nuclear bomb destroying any one computer center on the network. From those original four computers, this network evolved into the sprawling network of millions of computers we know today as the internet. The internet itself is really a massive "network of networks." There is no central "Internet, Inc," to which you can connect. Essentially, it is a collection of Internet service providers (ISPs) who each operate their own networks, with their own clients, and agree to interconnect with each other and exchange packets. Ultimately, these ISPs at all levels sell connections to individuals and corporations, who then merge their networks (or individual computers) into this larger network called the internet. Brief History of Internet

Invented in the late 50 s, Big ideas: packet switching, self contained messages The Internet got started as the Arpanet inherently decentralized designed to survive atomic attack designed to scale in a biological manner

1968 - DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) contracts with BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman) to create ARPAnet 1970 - First five nodes: UCLA Stanford UC Santa Barbara U of Utah, and BBN

1974 - TCP specification by Vint Cerf 1984 On January 1, the Internet with its 1000 hosts converts en masse to using TCP/IP for its messaging
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The Creation of the Internet

The creation of the Internet solved the following challenges: Basically inventing digital networking as we know it Survivability of an infrastructure to send / receive high-speed electronic messages Reliability of computer messaging

Internet Growth Trends

1977: 111 hosts on Internet 1981: 213 hosts 1983: 562 hosts Page 2

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1984: 1,000 hosts 1986: 5,000 hosts 1987: 10,000 hosts 1989: 100,000 hosts 1992: 1,000,000 hosts 2001: 150 175 million hosts 2002: over 200 million hosts By 2010, about 80% of the planet on the Internet

Internet Applications Email is the first killer app, and was added right away SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol POP3 - Post Office Protocol v3

Other document transfers were invented over time: FTP - File Transfer Protocol NNTP (Netnews) - threaded discussions Gopher - text search and archive Telnet- allows a user to log-in to a remote computer and many more

Now for the World Wide Web The Internet was in common use for scientists and academics and Unix geeks for 20+ years Tim Berners-Lee wanted to send formatted text with hyperlinks (1989) Thus was born the next higher protocol - HTTP: the Hypertext Transport Protocol But the new documents needed a description to be properly displayed with links - and thus we have HTML - the Hypertext Markup Language

Power to the People 1992 - The first audio and video broadcasts take place over the "MBONE." More than 1,000,000 hosts are part of the Internet. Let there be browsers HTML display applications that use HTTP to send and receive stuff 1993 - Mosaic, the first graphical user interface to the WWW developed by Marc Andreessen and NCSA and the University of Illinois becomes available Later developed NETSCAPE Traffic on the Internet expands at a 341,634% annual growth rate. Page 3

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Web 2.0 second generation of Web-based services Communication tools Collaborative technologies Social networking sites

Now we have social environments like: Wikipedia--The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration. Blog--user-generated website where entries are made in journal style (WEB LOG). Flicker--photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform, uses tags Craig's List--centralized network of online urban communities, featuring free classified advertisements (with jobs, housing, personals, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs and resumes categories) and forums sorted by various topics. YouTube--popular free video sharing website which lets users upload, view, and share video clips purchased in Nov 2006 by google for $1.65 Billion in google stock.

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And much more with the latest voice and video call facility through internet which has made communication possible at a very cheaper rates.

References:

Evolution of Technology by Catherine Seo, Cambridge College. Internet History & Growth by William F. Slater, III,Chicago Chapter of the Internet Society September 2002.
History and The Evolution of The technology/evolution-of-the-internet.html Internet, http://www.bizymoms.com/computers-and-

Thanks and With Regards, Maroof

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