The Internet was created to obtain a decentralized set of communication networks. Today, these networks are interconnected through TCP / IP protocols, so that it can function as a worldwide network.
We will probably be correct if we affirm that the internet is one of the most revolutionary inventions in human history. All things considered, it seems, more than an invention, a discovery. That is, the concept of ‘global village’, coined by Professor Hebert McLuhan in the sixties, and other similar conceptions about globality, or the need for a communications network on a world scale were already in the minds of many scientists and philosophers.
After the disaster of World War II, industrialization, international markets and policies, the UN, and other global ideas, mankind was poised for a planetary communications network, and its design, whatever its origin, seemed unavoidable. the human condition.
It was in the context of the Cold War that the internet was created. The United States and the USSR, both victors of the last great international conflict, measured their forces: nuclear, space … In 1957, the USSR put the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit; in 1961 he would put the first man in space and in 1963, the first woman. This advance had its response from the United States, whose President John F. Kennedy promised in 1961 that his country would place the first man on the Moon before the end of the decade. And so it was done, “settling” the discussion.
Were there military uses behind the origin of the internet?
Many believe that the internet was created for military purposes, but this is not exactly the case. The Internet arises from the need to create a secure communications network in the Department of Defense. And so ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) arises, in 1958, a year after the launch of Sputnik. Meanwhile, the United States Armed Forces were working to create a secure communications network that could withstand a nuclear attack.
ARPA was the first seed of the internet. Still, it wasn’t until a few years later that the foundations of the internet took shape. The so-called galactic network was one of the first conceptions of the idea of the internet, developed by Joseph CR Licklider and the founders of the company BBN Technologies, in 1963. At the same time, at MIT there were already doctoral research that tried to figure out how to send a message from one computer to another (email)
The birth of ARPANET
In 1968 the ARPANET Advanced Research Projects Agency Network was founded), promoted by Bob Taylor, the director of the Information Processing Techniques Office of ARPA, one of the most important figures in the foundation of the internet. Died in April 2017, many consider him “the inventor of the internet”, although this title is very difficult to concede to a single person, given that it was many engineers and scientists who worked for decades to perfect the internet as we know it today. day.
ARPANET is considered the first scientific and academic network in the world. In 1972, the first public demonstration of ARPANET was carried out and, over the years, the use of this network became more democratic and the sending of e-mails became popular. At that time, the protocol by which the Internet works today, TCP / IP, created in 1974 by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, did not yet exist.
The decisive event for the formation of the Internet as we know it today occurred between 1983 and 1990, when the entire ARPANET network (whose traffic was mostly e-mails) was progressively “migrated” to the TCP / IP protocol. Thus, when the process ended in 1990, ARPANET ceased to exist, and its substitute, the internet, remained. The origin of the word internet is actually ” inter networking “, although the use allowed the shortening by which we know it today.
In addition, the birth of the World Wide Web in 1989, a hypertext communication system (with links) or hypermedia, would be key to establishing Internet browsing. CERN scientists proposed in 1990 the use of hypertext to access various types of information that the user can navigate at will.
In the 90s the first search engines began to work: the first of them was Netscape. Later, companies like Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and Google are born. And, in the early 2000s, the first social networks were born: Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006).
