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How Did It All Start?

Even though countless transactions are done through the use of the internet, not many users really have an idea of how the internet phenomenon began. In this article you will see how the Internet goes back to the 1969s and how the effort evolved and gathered momentum in the following years. This is a brief information for those who wonder the origins of the Internet and will also help to understand the evolution of the Internet culture from a research experiment project into an academic service network and from there into the multi-provider ISP environment.

The Internet is the unintentional result from a project research originated by the United States Department of Defense in the late 1960s. The project was initially designed to help win the cold war by developing a model of computer networks. But the story is not entirely based in the U.S., this project was also refined in the United Kingdom at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in which the project was further designed by adding local networks with interface computers that communicated with a number of high-capacity processing systems. By 1971 the Advanced Research and Projects Agency (ARPA), a U.S. federal agency credited with initially deploying the network now known as the Internet, had connected 15 sites and 23 host computers. But unimaginable expansion of the network took place in later years.

At the beginning of the 1980s the introduction of three significant technologies, The IBM personal computer (PC), the Ethernet Local Area Network (LAN) and the Unix operating system, changed the information technology world in their own way. PCs were competent of exchanging information without the attendant need to use the central host system as the main data repository. PCs could copy the behavior of the host computer itself, though in a smaller scale and in a devoted way. Networking protocols were now the resources by which these PCs were linked into the local environment. Network had now to support access to shared storage and distributed file systems, as well as supporting access to common resources, such as printers and mass documentation storage, while supporting the more traditional host-to-host models of remote terminal access, bulk data transfer, and electronic messaging. Ethernet also play an important role in the evolution of the Internet by altering the wiring topology, replacing the wiring hub closet and radial spans with a single cable that passed every workstation. This form of local networking spawned an unlike set of improvement in networking. Unix was the third component of this technology trio. Back in the day, Unix was offered worldwide at nominal license fees and allowed the client to migrate between an increasingly large range of hardware platform, while serving a software environment.

In 1990s the Internet history starts to see drastic changes and multiplication, as academic and research networks proliferated with the U.S. federal sector and abroad and as commercial ISP operators started to make their first appearance. Rather than following a single thread of development, the environment of interconnection became the major theme at this point.

By 1998 the Internet served some 30 million connected computer. Today is difficult to estimate the amount of connected computers all around the world. These systems are serviced by Internet service providers across the globe, predominantly operating on a commercial basis as a service provider. The ISP industry now includes the participation of medium and small business ventures, most telephone service providers and cable companies. Their services range from the mass-marketing of simple access products to service-intensive operations that provide specialized service levels to more localized Internet markets.

The number of user, the number of connected systems and the volume of traffic continues to show exponential growth. This growth will probably will not continue in the long term, and at some point, market saturation will be clear. But for now, new applications continue to trigger the Internet, ranging from adaptation of existing activities into the Internet, such as e-commerce and Internet telephony, to the emerging area of the Internet utility appliance, such as the Web camera.

This brief history has provided some background as to how the Internet has developed during the past three decades. This history repeated itself within many countries as the Internet developed within their respective national environments.

source: Huston, Geoff. ISP survival Guide, 1999

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