The birth of internet: Here’s all you need to know

Can you imagine a day without internet? Infact, can you imagine an hour without internet on your mobile phone? Impossible, right? An absolute necessity today, internet was invented only in the last century, but has entirely changed the way we live and view the world. It has revolutionized our lives to the point where we can communicate with anyone across the world, no matter where we are. Today, every country on Earth except for Antarctica (due to poor infrastructure, and harsh weather) can be reached via internet! 

All of you know that internet is a network or system that links computers worldwide, electronically. But how many of us know the tale of how the internet came into existence? Come, let’s find out about the inception and journey of internet through decades.  

Born during the Cold War 
It all began during the 1950s to 1960s when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in the Cold War. Both nations competed to advance science and technology, prevent nuclear attacks and be ready for a counter-attack. In those days, computers were massive, expensive, and could accomplish limited tasks. Also, to access them, scientists had to travel long distances. The only solution was to link the computers for quick data transfer. So, in 1958, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), with the nation's top scientists. At ARPA, Lawrence Roberts and scientist Leonard Kleinrock were in charge of creating computer networks. Roberts was the first to link two computers together. Kleinrock successfully leveraged the first packet-switching network created in 1969 to transfer information to a different location, creating what we know today as the ARPANET. The first computer connection between Stanford and UCLA occurred on October 29, 1969. The first message planned to be transmitted over the network was ‘Login,’ but the connection between the two colleges crashed on the letter "g!" 

The evolution of internet 
ARPANET evolved to today's high speed internet over time, by adding or eliminating nodes or links, and with advancement in logical extension of network science. The year 1971 saw the invention of electronic mail, or e-mail, for sending messages from one computer to another. US-based internet wizards Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed a wider area networking method known as TCP / IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol) in 1973. In fact, this duo first used the term ‘internet’ in 1974 by them to describe the TCP / IP enabled network. By the mid-1970s, many groups of computers were connected in networks, through devices called routers. On January 1, 1983, all routers on the ARPANET switched over to TCP/IP, giving birth to the first wide area network of computers.  

The tale of WWW 
All of you must have seen ‘www’ written in front of most website addresses, isn't it? You all know that it stands for World Wide Web, a network of open websites accessible over the internet. But how did this emerge?  

Way back in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a bright young scientist from Oxford University was working as a software engineer at CERN, a global Particle Physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. His job was to ensure automated information-sharing amongst scientists in universities and institutes across the globe. These scientists were working on nuclear science and were unable to share data and findings with other researchers. By 1990, Berners-Lee figured out that information could be shared by using hypertext, the language of the internet and by making it the language for pages stored on the internet. All these pages, text, images, and files saved on the internet would have an address according to a common protocol, and this would create the web. In other words, he had identified the three core technologies that still serve as the pillars of the internet: HTML, URL, and HTTP. 

The pillars of internet  
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is basically a code that requests for information from another computer. HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is coding that organises a web page's content and is the base for everything on the web. Several such HTML webpages together form a website, and its opening page is called the home page. On each website, a word or button directs you to another place, called a hyperlink or URL. When you click on this link, it will direct you to the destination, which could be a webpage, document, file, or other online content.