The Internet – One man’s dream now a worldwide reality?
On my internet travels I was drawn to a site on which you can post 
your blog and hope to gain traffic from the site. I began to think about the sea of blogs that the site must contain and the ratio of blogs to people reading them. I think it is a correct assumption to say that the ratio between blogs:readers would be many:few. Â
Is that not a picture of life in general? Â In a normal day how many adverts will we see? Whether we see an advert on the television, on the side of a bus, on a billboard, or hear an advert on the radio - they are all vying for our attention and most of them we block out.
It got me wondering then, in a world so completely saturated with information and in which people are so busy, how did something like the internet capture the minds of people all around the world? Who came up with the idea? And was there only ever one idea to spark it? This I was resolved to find out.
Who created the internet?
So is the internet the result of one lone trail-blazer with a brilliant idea? Well... no. Whilst there are key players in the creation of the internet, more than one element had to be combined so as to produce the phenomenon we see today.
I was surprised to find out that the technology on which the internet is based largely came from US military research. In 1957, whilst the cold war was at the height of tension, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, which was the first man-made satellite. Needless to say, the United States and the Soviet Union at the time were not friendly and so the launch of Sputnik came as a shock and worry to the United States. At the time, the US President was President Eisenhower. Eisenhower instigated the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA, which is now renamed DARPA – D for defence) DARPA was initially purposed to concentrate on preventing technological surprise to the United States, like the launch of Sputnik.
In 1962, J.C.R Â Licklider was asked to lead two DARPA departments: Behavioural Sciences and Command and Control. LickLider had written a series of memos around 1960 -1962 which discussed his concept of a "Galactic Network". This concept proved to be very much like the internet we see today.
When he began working for DARPA in 1962, Licklider set up research contracts with leading research institutions in the US and before long had about a dozen universities and companies working on DARPA contracts. Licklider wanted the institutions to work together so that they could use their time and assets more efficiently. However, with the distance between the research institutions, working together was a difficult task. This is where DARPA initially added to the development of the internet as Licklider decided that he would attempt to link the institutions’ computers together in a network. The DARPA team set to work on this around 1962 and as a result, an experimental network was set up named ARPANET (ARPA – Network).
By linking these super-computers together, Licklider wanted to create a time-sharing network of computers. A time-sharing network would make it possible for the different institutions to use each other’s computer processing power to aid them when they had to do large calculations which required more power than their own computers could afford, or when the computers of another facility might do a job better than their own.
In order to create this time-sharing network, packet switching was brought onto the scene. Before packet-switching, the common method of communication was circuit switching. With circuit switching, one terminal would open a communications line in order to connect to another terminal before any communication could be transmitted. This line remained open until all the information was sent. Whilst the communication line was open, no other terminal could connect to either terminal, either the one transmitting or the one receiving data.
Circuit switching is used for telephone calls, so when someone calls your telephone, a connection is made and whilst you are on the telephone, no one else can reach you, but instead they go through to your voicemail if you have one set up. If you have no voicemail set up, they simply get the busy tone. This was the communication method of the time.
Interestingly, the concept of packet-switching was not the idea of a single person. I'll not go into too much detail here (don't worry, I don't want you to get information overload, however, I thought this was an interesting little bit of extra information). Around 1967, Lawrence G. Roberts, presented a paper on his packet switching plan for the ARPANET. At the same conference, however, a paper was presented with regard to packet switching by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL in the UK. Work by Paul Baran from RAND was also present at the conference in which a similar concept of packet switching was discussed. The work at RAND, NPL and MIT had all focused on similar concepts without them realising. Great minds think alike ay?
ARPANET was the first computer network to use packet-switching in communicating data. With packet switching, the aim was to enable more than one message to be sent to different terminals at any given time. Using this new network communications method, messages could be broken up into separate packages and then sent in packets to the recipient. The separate packets could find separate routes through different communication links and end up in the same destination, at which point the packets would be reassembled in the correct order. Â This meant that more than one message could be sent through one terminal at the same time, which meant a serious increase in network productivity.
This packet switching method can be illustrated by the way text messages are sent today in that, when your message hits the maximum size set by the network, it is separated into two or more messages and then sent separately. When the text messages reach the recipient, they are reassembled and viewed in the correct order.
The development of this time-sharing, packet switching network was important to technological development, as packet switching is used in local area networks and throughout the internet today.
ARPANET in time became a "backbone" network to an emerging world of smaller local area networks (LANs). This meant that smaller local networks could connect to ARPANET. By being connected to the ARPANET "backbone" network, they were in effect also connected to each other.
By 1972 there were 37 of these host computers connected to ARPANET and in 1973, ARPANET blazed a trail beyond the United States by making its first international connections to England and Norway.
Around 1973, Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed the basic concepts of TCP/ IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) which later became the root for many of the internet protocols we see today such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol), SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), p2p (Peer to Peer).
Another interesting development in 1983 was the reforming of ARPANET into two networks, one remaining ARPANET and a new one named MILNET (Military Network). Since ARPANET was gaining such popularity, it was no longer deemed safe to have military information on it. Therefore, MILNET was created to keep military information safely top secret.
1983 proved to be a continuously interesting time as it was in this year that the first desktop computers began to appear. This began making networked information increasingly available to the general public, and so as desktop computers progressed and became more and more affordable, the internet grew.
In 1987, there were ten thousand hosts on the Internet. Interestingly, the internet grew exponentially, as two years later there were around one hundred thousand hosts on the internet.
By 2002, there were over two million hosts and eight hundred and forty million users on the internet.
The internet has now grown into such proportions that no one can stake a claim of ownership over it, in the same way as the creator of the first phone wire cannot stake a claim over all telephone communications technology today.
In the early days, the internet simply provided screens of text, information from other computers, but it was not visually stimulating.
So what has changed it into the internet we see today?
This change was largely due to the World Wide Web which made the internet user-friendly, meaning that more people began to see the positive benefits of the internet, which in turn meant increased growth.
Last Word
Of course, as with many things, the creation of the internet can be a controversial subject.
If you would like to share your opinion, feel free to send an email to
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