When did the Internet first appear in the world? History of the Internet: in what year it appeared and why it was created. The current state of the World Wide Web

We can name the creators of the steam engine, airplane or cinema. However, many brilliant scientists and teams from entire universities took part in the creation of the Internet. Technology developed quite slowly, so over the years, a variety of people contributed to the formation of the “global web.”

Like most other technologies that were advanced for its time, the Internet appeared as a military development. The first attempts to create wireless communications began at the height of the Cold War. The US leadership was concerned about the USSR's success in space exploration. According to a number of American military experts, space technology would make the Soviet Union absolutely invulnerable in the event of an armed conflict. Therefore, immediately after the successful launch of the Soviet Sputnik 1 in 1957, development of a new system for data transmission began in America. All research was conducted under the auspices of the US Department of Defense and was kept in the deepest confidence. The technical departments of the best universities in the country took part in the creation of the new technology.

In 1962, Joseph Licklider, an employee of the University of Massachusetts who also worked part-time at the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense (ARPA), proposed his solution to the problem. Licklider believed that communication could be done through computers. Under his leadership, work began on a project called ARPANET in the 1960s. It was planned that messages in such a network would be transmitted in their entirety, but such transmission had several serious flaws: the impossibility of interaction between a large number of users, high cost, inefficient use of network bandwidth, and the inability to function normally if individual network components were destroyed.

A scientist from the University of California, Paul Baran, began working to eliminate these shortcomings. The result of his work was a new way of transmitting information - packet switching. In fact, each message was divided into several packets, each of which went to the recipient via its own channel. Thanks to this technical solution, the new data transmission network became virtually invulnerable.

At the end of 1969, a historical event took place - the first message was transmitted over ARPANET. The communication session was carried out between the University of California and Stanford University and was successful only on the second attempt. It took an hour and a half to transmit the short word “login” over a distance of 640 km. At that time, only 4 computers were connected to the network, located at different universities in America. By the early 1970s, e-mail was established, allowing the exchange of messages within the network. And at the same time, the Internet ceased to be an exclusively American system. Universities in Hawaii, Great Britain and Norway have joined the network. As the number of computers on the network grew, their interaction became increasingly slow and out of sync.

Another scientist who worked at ARPA, Winston Surf, took up the task of establishing the integration of computers into a single network. Surf developed two protocols:

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP);
and the optional Internet Protocol (IP).

Thanks to the joint work of the two protocols, it became possible to establish connections between many computers located around the world.

Internet before WWW

In the 1980s, ARPANET was already a fairly convenient tool through which universities, research laboratories and institutes could communicate with each other. In 1984, the domain name system came into being. Each of the computers included in the network was assigned its own domain name. Over time, this system changed: the domain became simply a component of many email addresses, and not the name of a specific device. For convenience, user and domain names are separated from each other by the @ symbol. Later, a new way of communicating online appeared: computer owners could not only send files to each other, but also communicate in real time in special chats.

In order to simplify the exchange of e-mail, the first corresponding program appeared in 1991. However, all this time the Internet remained only a set of channels for transferring data from one computer to another, and only leading scientists in Europe and the USA used it. A revolutionary decision that made the Internet available to all computer owners was the emergence and further development of the WWW system.

The emergence of WWW

In the early 1990s, English physicist and programmer Tim Berners-Lee began working on an open system that would allow various data to be posted online so that any user could have access to it. Initially, it was planned that this system would allow physicists to exchange the necessary information. This is how the well-known global network appeared - the World Wide Web (WWW). To place and search data on the digital network, it was necessary to create additional tools:

HTTP data transfer protocol;
HTML language, thanks to which it became possible to design websites;
URIs and URLs that could be used to find and link to a specific page.

The world's first website was created in August 1991 by Berners-Lee himself. On the page with the address info.cern.ch, the creator of the global network described the new data placement system and the principles of its operation.

Netscape browser

Over the next five years after the creation of the WWW, 50 million users joined the network. To make Internet surfing easier, a browser was developed - Netscape, which already had the functions of scrolling and following hyperlinks. The first search engine was Aliweb, which was later replaced by Yahoo!. Since Internet speed was very slow, website creators could not use a large number of pictures and animations. The first sites were predominantly text-based and were quite inconvenient for users. For example, in order to follow a hyperlink, the user had to type on the keyboard the serial number of this hyperlink, indicated in square brackets.

In 1992, America passed a law allowing the use of the Internet for commercial purposes. After that, all large companies began to acquire their own websites. Pages appeared with the help of which one could reserve a table in a cafe, order food or buy some consumer goods. Many large magazines and newspapers began to post their issues on the Internet. To gain access to such an electronic publication, you had to buy a subscription.

A new milestone in the digital revolution was the emergence of social networks, which allowed people from all over the world to communicate.

In Russia, the introduction of Internet technologies began in 1990, and in 1994, domain.ru appeared. Initially, Russian sites, like American ones, were devoted primarily to advanced technological developments and news from the world of science. The very first domestic website was a catalog of English and Russian-language resources located at 1-9-9-4.ru.

There are many opinions about who exactly invented the Internet. Even several people are called “parents” of the World Wide Web. Well-known media figure Gordon Crovitz considered it necessary to present his version of the birth.

“Who invented the Internet?” asked former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz. And he answered it from the pages of the same publication. One of the most common versions is that the Internet was created by order of the US government for military purposes, but this legend has little to do with the truth, Crovitz wrote.

The creation of the Internet by the US government is just one of the urban legends. “The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet because it needed to maintain communications even in the event of a nuclear attack,” writes Crovitz.

According to the official version, in the 50s of the last century, during the Cold War, the US Department of Defense began to think about the need to create a reliable, trouble-free information transmission system. As one of the options, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now DARPA) proposed developing a computer network. The project was entrusted to four organizations: the universities of California, Santa Barbara, Utah and the Stanford Research Center. They created the ARPAnet. The work began in 1957, and only 12 years later - in 1969 - the network connected the computers of the listed universities.

However, the idea of the Internet itself arose earlier, Crovitz recalls. During World War II, US President Theodore Roosevelt's scientific advisor, Vannevar Bush, was part of a group of scientists involved in the Manhattan Project [the code name for the US nuclear weapons program]. Later, in 1946, he wrote an article “How We Can Think,” in which he proposed a prototype of a device that could “expand human memory” - Memex. This device was presented as a kind of “repository” for all human knowledge, amenable to formal description, and capable of quickly finding and providing the necessary information. Many technology enthusiasts see Memex's description as a prediction of the Internet.

Of course, at that time this was perceived by many as a figment of a wild imagination. But already in the late sixties, engineers tried to combine several communication networks into one “global” network, that is, in fact, to create a prototype of the “World Wide Web”. As Gordon Crovitz writes, the federal government's involvement in this project was modest - through the ARPA agency. But the purpose of the project was not to maintain communications during a nuclear attack, and, in fact, ARPAnet was not pro-Internet, if you understand the Internet as the connection of two or more computer networks, Robert Taylor, who led the 60 s project at ARPA.

“But if the Internet was not invented by the government, then by whom?” - Gordon Crovitz continues to ask. Vinton Cerf created the TCP/IP protocol, the basis of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee became the “father of the World Wide Web”, embodying the idea of hyperlinks.

But the main credit goes to the company where Robert Taylor moved after working at ARPA - Xerox. It was in the Xerox PARC laboratory, located in Silicon Valley, that Ethernet technology was developed in 1970, designed to transfer data between various computer networks. As we know today, the same laboratory developed the Xerox Alto personal computer and graphical user interface.

Michael Hiltzik's book Dealers of Lightning, which tells the story of Xerox PARC, also provides information about the creation of Ethernet. At some point, the leading researchers at the laboratory realized that the government was too busy with other matters to care about connecting various computer networks into a single Network. Therefore, they had to deal with this issue themselves. At the same time, Xerox PARC employees blamed ARPA, which, while receiving government funding, worked, in their opinion, too slowly.

Later, in one of his letters, Robert Taylor wrote: “I believe that the Internet was created at Xerox PARC, around 1975, when we linked Ethernet and ARPAnet through PUP (PARC Universal Protocol).”

So, the Internet was created at Xerox PARC. “But then why didn’t Xerox become the world’s largest company?” - the author of the article asks another question. The answer is simple and obvious: the company's management was too focused on the core business to notice innovative developments and calculate their potential.

Xerox executives at the company's headquarters in Rochester, New York, were too focused on selling copiers. From their point of view, Ethernet could only be used so that people in the same office could link several computers to share a copier.

Many people know the story of how in 1979, Apple founder Steve Jobs came to Xerox PARC for ideas - he entered into an agreement with Xerox management under which he could gain access to any innovative developments of the laboratory. “They just didn’t know what they were,” Jobs later said, who helped make Apple a great company thanks in part to developments he learned from Xerox.

However, the sale of copiers brought profit to Xerox for decades. The company's name even became synonymous with the copier. But Xerox missed the boat, and in the era of the digital revolution, company managers can only console themselves with the thought that only a few manage to successfully move from one technological era to another.

In 1995, the development of the Internet came completely under the control of commercial companies. The part of the network controlled by the supercomputers of the US National Science Foundation was left with only its own narrow niche. Since this year, the commercial Internet began to grow at an explosive pace, although before that it had been “languishing” under government control for almost 30 years. In less than 10 years, companies have achieved a real technological revolution, which, according to Gordon Crovitz, once again proves the greater role of business than government.

To build a successful technology business, both factors must be present: disruptive technology and the special skills to bring it to market. The contrast between Apple and Xerox shows that few business leaders can succeed in the face of such a daunting task. It is they, and not the government, who bear the main credit.

Until now, in the history of mankind there have only been two information revolutions that brought radical qualitative changes to the process of disseminating knowledge. The first of these was the advent of writing, the second the invention of printing. Now we can observe the beginning of the third information revolution, primarily associated with the emergence of the global computer network Internet, which is considered one of the most serious achievements of modern technical thought. The essence of this breakthrough is that anyone can instantly gain access to the knowledge accumulated by humanity throughout its existence.

The Internet was formed in the last two decades of the 20th century. as a result of combining multiple local and territorial computer networks. The appearance of the first local networks dates back to the 60s of the last century. Each such network included computers of an organization located in one or more neighboring buildings and connected by cables through which information was exchanged. Several local networks, united into one, constituted a territorial network.

Immediately after the first artificial Earth satellite was launched in the USSR in 1957, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created as a division of the US Department of Defense, responsible for the development of new technologies for use in the military. The agency's tasks included creating a reliable information transmission system in case of hostilities. In 1961, MIT student Leonard Kleinrock described a technology that could split files into pieces and transfer them from one computer to another. Two years later, ARPA Computer Laboratory Director John Licklider proposed the first detailed concept of a computer network.

The decision was made to network ARPA computers. The development of the computer network was carried out by the Stanford Research Center, the University of Utah and the University of California. The network was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), and in 1969 it united these scientific institutions.

In September 1969, the first ARPANET server was installed at the University of California on a Honeywell DP-516 computer. On October 29 of the same year, it was possible to carry out a communication session between two ARPANET network nodes located at a distance of 640 km at the Stanford Research Institute and the University of California. This date is considered the birthday of the Internet. The big advantage of the ARPANET system was that it could ensure uninterrupted operation of computers even in the event of a nuclear attack.

Initially, the network only connected scientists with remote computer centers, but soon it became possible to send e-mail through it and exchange information. By 1971, the first program to send email over the Internet was developed. Its creator was Ray Tomlison, a programmer at the computer company Bolt Beranek and Newman. ARPANET began to actively grow and develop, but it was used mainly by scientists associated with the military departments. In 1973, the first foreign organizations from Great Britain and Norway were connected to the network via a transatlantic telephone cable, and the network became international. A year later, the first commercial version of ARPANET, the Telenet network, went into operation.

University of California.

Map diagram of the ARPANET computer network. 1973

In the early years, the network was used primarily for email correspondence, followed by mailing lists, message boards, and news groups. However, at that time, only networks built on the same technical standards could interact with each other. In 1982-1983 The various data transfer protocols that emerged by the late 1970s were standardized, after which the ARPANET switched to the TCPIP protocol, which is still used to interconnect networks.

As early as the late 1970s, several other national computer networks were created following the example of ARPANET, connecting various societies, groups and organizations (for example, CSNET, which unites researchers in the field of computing and programming). In 1983, ARPANET split into two networks, ARPANET and MULNET. MULNET was reserved for military purposes, ARPANET was used mainly for scientific purposes. A system for exchanging information between them was provided. It was the APRANET network that later received the name Internet. Gradually, all national computer networks in the United States were connected to the Internet.

In 1984, the ARPANET faced a serious challenger. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) founded an extensive inter-university network, NSFNet, which included smaller networks, including the well-known Usenet and Bitnet, and had much greater bandwidth than ARPANET.

More than 10 thousand computers connected to NSFNet in just one year, with routing carried out by five high-speed supercomputers located in research centers.

In 1989, the European Council for Nuclear Research adopted the concept of the World Wide Web, a system that provides access to related documents located on various computers connected to the Internet. It was proposed by the British scientist Timothy Berners-Lee, who owes the “three pillars” of the web: the Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP, the hypertext markup language HTML, and URI resource identifiers. Now the World Wide Web has become publicly accessible.

The first connection to the Internet via a telephone line (the so-called dialup access) using a special modem device was made in 1990. At the same time, ARPANET, which had completely lost its position, ceased to exist. Two years later, the first program for viewing web pages appeared, the famous web browser for the Microsoft Windows operating system NCSA Mosaic, developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. The introduction of the user interface became a kind of watershed between the Internet for specialists and the Internet for everyone.

The NeXT computer used by T. Berners-Lee as the first web server.

T. Berners-Lee.

Since 1995, routing began to be handled by network providers of organizations providing access to Internet services. To develop and implement uniform technological standards, the World Wide Web Consortium was formed, headed by Berners-Lee. By the mid-1990s, the Web had become the dominant provider of information on the Internet, significantly outpacing FTP in terms of traffic volume. And although initially the Internet was understood as a technological support for communication between computers, and the World Wide Web was a system for distributing information, soon these two concepts were mixed.

Over the last decade of the last century, the vast majority of local and territorial computer networks joined the Internet, although some, like Fidonet, remained separate. Due to the absence of unified leadership and censorship, as well as the openness of technical standards, such an association looked extremely attractive; in addition, the networks were independent of businesses and specific companies. By the beginning of the 21st century. More than 10 million computers have already been connected to the global network. Internet technologies, in particular the TCP IP protocol, also began to be used to create intranet networks of separate corporate networks with or without Internet access.

If in the first years of the 21st century. Since the main type of mass Internet access was an inconvenient modem connection that occupied a telephone line, it is now considered obsolete. The modem was replaced first by a dedicated telephone line with ADSL technology (English: Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), then by connection via cable television networks, fiber optic lines, via radio channels and communication satellites. Connecting to the network using cellular communications is becoming increasingly popular, not only through desktop and laptop computers, but also through mobile phones.

The Internet is a positive feedback loop, meaning that the more information and physical resources become available, the more people and companies seek access to these resources. The Internet successfully copes with the information and educational function, and every year it occupies an increasingly significant position in the field of communication. With its help, you can contact your interlocutor located anywhere on Earth and even outside it (in 2010, the ISS crew received direct access to the Internet), as well as see and hear him. Moreover, the Internet allows you to communicate in real time with an unlimited number of people at the same time.

As they say, every cloud has a silver lining, but good without a silver lining is a miracle. The main disadvantage of the Internet, which at the same time is also its advantage, is the complete lack of control over the information posted on the network by users. Internet addiction also poses a serious danger, which affects a large number of people who are completely out of touch with reality. Yet there is no doubt that in the future the Internet will penetrate the vast majority of aspects of human existence.

International Space Station ISS.

Internet wizard

According to estimates by sociologists and computer network specialists, by 2012 approximately 1.9 billion people (30% of the entire population of our planet) were connected to the Internet, and in the future the volume of IP traffic will double every two years.

The Internet “reaches” to the most remote corners of the planet. So, at the beginning of the 21st century. Representatives of Eskimo tribes living far from civilization began to use the Internet. When the term "Internet" needed to be translated into one of their languages, Inuit, the experts chose the word ikiaqqivik, which translates to "journey through layers." Previously, this word was used to describe the actions of a shaman who, falling into a trance, “passed” through time and space and communicated with the spirits of dead or far-living people.

In May 1961, Kleinrock published a paper entitled "Information Flow in Broad Communication Networks." In 1962, the American scientist Licklider became the first director of the Information Processing Technical Office (IPTO) and proposed his vision of the network. The ideas of Kleinrock and Licklider were supported by Robert Taylor. He also proposed the idea of creating a system that later became known as Arpanet.

This computer network became the prototype of the modern World Wide Web.

First steps

In the late 60s of the 20th century, the Internet began to develop. In the summer of 1968, a working group chaired by Elmer Shapiro discussed questions regarding how host computers could communicate with each other.

In December 1968, Elmer Shapiro, together with the Stanford Research Institute, published the title "Exploring the Parameters of Computer Network Design." This work was used by Lawrence Roberts and Barry Wessler to create the final version of the IMP.

BBN Technologies later received a grant to develop and create a computer subnet.

In July 1969, the creation of the Internet became known to the general public when the University of California, Los Angeles, issued a press release.

In 1969, the first switch and with it the first specialized mini-computer were sent to the University of California, Los Angeles. In the same year, the first signal is sent from the switch to the computer.

The advent of email

The first email was sent in 1971 by programmer Ray Tomlinson. The first message was transmitted between two cars standing literally side by side. After the message was successfully sent, Ray Tomlinson sent emails to his colleagues explaining how to send such messages.

The instructions for sending e-mail concerned the fact that the “dog” character separates the user name and the name of the computer from which the message is being written.

This is how Ray Tomlinson became the creator of email.

Other inventions

After the creation of email, scientists continued to come up with new inventions.

In 1974, a commercial version of Aparnet appeared, called Telenet.

In 1973, engineer Bob Metcalfe proposed the idea of Ethernet.

In 1977, Dennis Hayes and Dale Hetherington released the first modem. Modems are becoming popular among Internet users.

Tim Berners-Lee made a great contribution to the development of the modern Internet. In 1990, he invented the HTML code, which greatly influenced the appearance of the Internet.

Most modern internet browsers are descended from the Mosaic browser. It is the first graphical browser used on the World Wide Web and was created in 1993. Its authors are Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina.

The idea of creating an information network between computers was first expressed in 1960 by Joseph Likelider, head of the computer department of the US Department of Homeland Security. In 1962, he and colleague Welden Clark published the first scientific paper on online communication.

6 years after the idea was voiced, the first practical developments began. The predecessor of the Internet was the ARPANET project. It was developed on the basis of laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Berkeley. In 1969, the first data packet was sent over the ARPANET.

Using the first communication channel, only small text messages could be sent, since the computer power was low.

The network developed gradually. By 1981, more than 200 computers were connected to it, mainly belonging to scientific institutes and laboratories. Since the seventies, the development of special software for remote computer communication began. One of the first such programs was written by Steve Crocker. ARPANET existed autonomously until 1983, after which this network was connected to the TCP/IP protocol and became part of the future global Internet.

Along with ARPANET, other local network projects appeared. In France, the information and scientific network CYCLADES was developed, launched in 1973. Somewhat later, Fidonet appeared - the first network that became truly popular among amateur users.

TCP/IP protocol and creation of a global network

Those who tried to create local networks eventually faced the issue of incompatibility of data transfer protocols. This problem was solved at the Stanford Research Institute, where the TCP/IP protocol was developed in 1978. By the mid-eighties, this protocol had supplanted all others within the ARPANET network.

The name of the Internet itself appeared in the seventies in connection with the development of the TCP/IP protocol.

In the second half of the eighties, the consolidation of local networks continued. The local networks of NASA and other American government organizations switched to the TCP/IP protocol. European scientific institutes also began to connect to the common network. At the end of the eighties, it was the turn of the countries of Asia and the states of the socialist bloc - the first network to spread widely in the USSR was Fidonet, but over time the Internet began to play an increasingly significant role.

Since the nineties, the Internet has ceased to be exclusively a tool of scientists and government organizations - the number of amateur users began to grow, which continues to this day.

It might be useful to read: