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Everything has a “start”. The Internet, as we know it today, also had a very humble but interesting beginning.
J C R Licklider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) envisioned the internet as far back as August 1962 in a series of memos written by him that talked about social interactions that could be enabled through networking, a concept that he termed his “Galactic Network”. According to his concept, all computers across the planet would be interconnected and by this everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. Licklider joined DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) in October 1962 where he convinced his successors Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and Lawrence Roberts, about the importance of this networking concept.
In 1966, Lawrence Roberts presented a plan for ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) at DARPA for developing a packet Network Concept. Before this event Leonard Kleinrock at MIT convinced Roberts of the feasibility of using packets rather than circuits to transfer data, which eventually became a big leap in the area of computer networking. To prove this, Roberts with Thomas Merrill in 1965, connected the TX-2 computer in MIT to the Q-32 computer in California using an extremely low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first wide area computer network ever built. In August 1968, Roberts and DARPA funded community refined the overall structure and specifications for ARPANET. This led to a ‘Release for Quotations’ by DARPA to manufacture packet switches called Interface Message Processors, which was fulfilled by a firm called BBN. During the year 1969, a full-fledging Internet came into existence with its four nodes at University of California, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and University of UTAH with work done by Bob Kahn of BBN, Kleinrock’s team and Roberts. In October 1972, Bob Kahn demonstrated ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference, first time in the front of the general public.
ARPANET was transformed into the Internet. The technology involved in this was a very basic packet switching network that later moved to include packet satellite networks, ground based packet radio networks and other networks. By 1985, the Internet was refined and well-established as a technology and although it was still limited; to researchers and developers but regular computer users started to use it as daily activities.
By 1990, the ARPANET was decommissioned and the major protocol TCP/IP had displaced most other Wide Area Networking (WAN) protocols. After a while, the World Wide Web came into existence. A consortium called World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was also formed which was led initially by Tim Berners Lee and Al Vezza. The W3C is the consortium that has taken on the responsibility for evolving the various protocols and standard associated with the web. It happened in 1992. This started the revolution of Internet which has become an essential part of our daily life.
