The way to communicate before the Internet was the telegraph, which was invented in 1840 and was really very useful at the time.
The true origin of the Internet is in 1958... seriously... back then the USA founded the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) through its Ministry of Defense.
The objective?
Find a way to have direct communication between two computers to be able to communicate to different research bases. Only that? ... of course not, in fact it was created during the Cold War and they intended to make military communications less vulnerable by eliminating dependence on a central computer.
To do this they needed about 200 scientists and a lot of money. In 1962 ARPA created a research program under the direction of John Licklider and in 1967 ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was born, a computer network that compiled the best ideas from three teams: MIT, Natinonal Physics Laboratory (UK) and the Rand Corporation, however in 1969 the first 4 computers were connected through Leonard Kleinrock's Interface Message Processor, in that same year the 'internet' opened to the public.
In 1971 ARPANET already had 23 connected points and the first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson. The following year it was presented at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington DC, where scientists demonstrated that the system did work by creating a network of 40 connected points in different places.
Between 1974 and 1982, quite a few networks were created, but the following stood out:
Telenet (1974) commercial version of ARPANET
Usenet (1979) Open system focused on e-mail that continues to function!
Bitnet (1981) linked American universities using IBM systems
Eunet (1982) which linked the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and The Netherlands.
Finally in 1981, ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocol and at that time the Internet (International Net) was created.
The use of the network was limited to the exchange of emails and as a documentary fund to store global information. But locating and identifying information still remains a fairly complex task. Fun fact Google in 2014 mentioned its search engine only reflected 0.004% of all information.
After that HTML was created, but you can read about this on another article here.
The Internet, the World Wide Web (www), was introduced in 1991. Two years later CERN opened the web for commercial use.
The first web page is still active, it is a very basic HTML with active links. You can access here.
Top comments (4)
Would it take longer to code that original web page in 1991 or in 2024? I think that by the time I could bootstrap a javascript framework, install all the npm packages, write the code, fight with the linter, configure SSR, and deploy to an edge provider somebody with emacs and a 14.4k modem would've beat me to it.
Love this type of post about history! ❤️
I written about WWW last year, but read before the creation of the Web, It's like a jigsaw puzzle being put together 🕺
World Wide Web
Thomas Bonnet ・ Mar 12 '23
I did not know internet ment international network. Something new everyday
A great book for anyone wanting to know more about ARPANET and the early precursors to the modern Internet is "Where Wizards Stay Up Late". Very good read.