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A Brief History of the Internet
By Ramin Tawakuli
Introduction
The internet as we know it today wasn't automatically dreamt up, pursued and made into reality just because of the great possibilities it has. The internet came about from a US government research project that was in response to the Soviet Union launching Sputnik 1. Of course, when the country you just happen to be at "war" with makes a technological advancement you didn't foresee, that's enough to wake up any government to get into gear.
ARPANET
The reaction the government had to the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union was to create an agency to do research for the government. It was called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA (sometimes called DARPA, the D being Defense). The Agency then went to work by providing funds to the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). The main point of ARPANET was to create an information system that could continue functioning in spite of losing any part of the network to a disaster (like say a nuclear bomb! o.o;). So, they tried experimenting with a computer network. They eventually decided that the network would be connected through a packet-switching method. Finally, they put the first nodes at select universities, and ARPANET was established. From this start, it would go on to be the backbone of the Internet, continuing to expand and grow until 1990, when it was dissolved and NSFNET took on the responsibility of being the backbone of the internet.
CSNET
Even with the foundation of ARPANET, many universities were not connected to it, mainly cause they were not participating in research for the network. They were aware of it though, and wanted to get connected to it. The plan was to connect non-ARPANET computer science departments together. To sponsor the project, the National Science Foundation awarded $5 million to the CSNET project, as it was called. It was an important event in the history of the internet, for it led to the development of the NSFNET.
NSFNET
The National Science Foundation involvement in CSNET helped to propel it into other projects of important's. NSF eventually launched the Supercomputing Program, to make high performance computers available for research. First funding was given to purchase supercomputers few locations, but later would expand to bring supercomputers to other institutes of notice as well. This entire program was to create a network that would move data twenty-five times faster than the speed of CSNET, and connect several regional networks. All this was to create a "inter-net", a "network of networks", including ARPANET. In the first year that NSFNET was up and running, traffic was so great it needed an upgrade. Traffic continued to grow on NSFNET, that another upgrade was in the works to allow for faster transportation of data. The second upgrade increased the speed thirty-fold, the network expanding so much that its was transferring 1.3 trillion bytes of information per month.
CERN
InterNIC
INTERNET