Brief History & Evolution Of The Internet

The Internet (Information Network) has now become a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government networks, which together carry various information and services alike. But how exactly did this vast network come about?

In the 1960's, the Department of Defense wing of the United States government sought to create a network that would still function in the event of a disaster, be it natural or man-made. It sought to create advances in the field of information storage and retrieval. With the assistance of some graduate students, ARPANET, the world's first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet, was soon developed. Packet Switching, a communications paradigm,allows a system to use one communication link to communicate with more than one machine by assembling data into packets. If information could not be sent directly, it would navigate around traffic to find an alternate route.

TCP/IP the first two network protocols to be defined, emerged in 1978. Consisting of a set of layers, each layer solves a set of problems involving the transmission of data, and provides a well-defined service to the upper layer protocols based on using services from some lower layers. By 1982, the U.S. Department of Defense made TCP/IP the standard for all military computer networking.

It is generally agreed upon that the turning point of the Internet began with the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, which was a graphical browser developed by a team at the NCSA. Mosaic's graphical interface, which was primarily text-based, became the preferred interface for accessing the Internet. It was eventually overtaken by Marc Andreessen Netscape Navigator, and then was soon displaced with the development of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Today, the Internet has become part of everyday life. It has grown to include more services, e-mail, online chatting and file-sharing among the few. As of 30th September 2007, it is estimated that 1.244 billion people now use the internet regularly.