History Channel - The Invention of the Internet

The idea of connecting computers to improve the sharing of information was first envisioned by J.C.R. Licklider, a psychologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during a time when computers where still seen as futuristic as autonomous robots and ray-guns. Computer communication was overshadowed in the United States by the space program but still continued forward at M.I.T. with Leonard Klinerock’s application of queueing theory to data transmission. This theory made data packets line up as they arrived at nodes of a communications network and wait to be sent out to the next node. He would also improve the speed of communication with the theories of demand access, which meant data packets were only sent where requested and distributed control, which dispersed authority so that no one device would be responsible for controlling the whole network.

These innovations made people realize that Licklider’s idea of connected computer communication network was possible. Further development was made by Paul Beran, who was hired by the U.S. government to create a communication network that was less vulnerable than the telephones of the time that used the method of circuit switching, which was easily disrupted by simply cutting the single circuit between caller and receiver. Beran came up with hot-potato routing which had small chopped up pieces of data, called packets, find their way through the communication network like mice in a maze by having the nodes of the network decide where to send the packets when they arrived at the node. The nodes would keep a copy of the packets and continue to send them until the packet had successfully made it to the next node. This is called packet-switching.

Then in 1969, born out of ARPA researcher Bob Taylor’s frustration, a $1,000,000(a bit over seven million today) was put toward creating a computer network to connect the expensive and sparse research machines so that they could communicate with each other and be accessed from a single terminal. With the help Dr. Lawrence Roberts, who developed the first network between two computers at M.I.T., they came up with a system of smaller identical computers, called Interface Message Processors(IMPs), that would connect to one another and act as interpreters for the larger research machines at institutes. This computer network would be called ARPAnet. Graduate students at SRI worked on the language and software that would be used to communicate between the research machines and the IMPs, while engineers at BBN worked out the kinks of packet-switching. By the end of 1969 four nodes at different universities in the western U.S. were connected, increasing to 18 nodes across the entire U.S. by 1971. After the establishment of this revolutionary network the first great application was developed, electronic mail.

Raymond Tomlinson, of his own initiative, took a mail program meant to operate between users on the same machine and merged it with the file-sharing capability of the ARPAnet to create a long-distance electronic messaging program and the iconic at symbol, @. More and more uses for the network would come about over the years as both the number of computers and networks increased, thanks to the collaborative and open nature of the internet. With this increase of connections and nodes in the connected world, so too did the need for a standardized protocol with which all computers and networks could communicate. This led to the creation and adoption of the TCP/IP protocol by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1983. Finally, with the inventions of the world wide web and user-friendly browser programs in 1993, computers users could follow and find information in a way much more similar to the way that people think.These innovations over many decades led us to the Internet that we know today, and further innovations in both hardware and software will continue to shape the way we communicate into the future.

Disclaimer:

This is a summary of a video written by an inept college student and is subject to change and/or being completely wrong.