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DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET

The Internet didn't just happen overnight - rather it was the end result of a search that had been in place since the late 1950s. By the time the world started to get online in the mid 1990s, the Net had been almost 40 years in the making.Take a look at our free and exciting secondary education learning resource for a more detailed history of the Internet.ARPANET is born (1960) : an Internet is conceived In 1969 the Pentagon commissioned ARPANET for research into networking. The following year, Vinton Cerf and others published their first proposals for protocols that would allow computers to 'talk' to each other. ARPANET began operating Network Control Protocol (NCP), the first host-to-host protocol.In 1974 Vint Cerf joined Bob Kahn to present their 'Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection' specifying the detailed design of the 'Transmission Control Program' (TCP) - the basis of the modern Internet. In 1978 TCP was split into TCP (now short for Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol).

TCP/IP defined : the foundation of the Internet:In 1982 TCP/IP was established as the protocol for ARPANET. This provided one of the first definitions of an internet as a connected set of networks using TCP/IP, but defining 'the Internet' as all connected TCP/IP internets.The launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik in 1957 threw the American military and scientific establishment into near panic with visions of Soviet weapons in space striking a helpless America. As part of the response, in 1959 the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was formed within the Pentagon to establish an American lead in military science and technology.

By the early 1960s the first theories of computer networking were starting to be shaped and in 1965 ARPA sponsored a study on 'co-operative network of time-sharing computers'.The first such plan was shaped by Lawrence G. Roberts, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in October 1966. Designs for such a network were put forward the following year and in 1968 the Pentagon sent out requests for proposals for ARPANET - a computer network to unite America's military and scientific establishmen

The World Wide Web is invented (1991) : anyone and everyoneBy the end of the 1980s the European Particle Research Laboratory CERN in Geneva was one of the premier Internet sites in Europe. CERN desperately needed a better way of locating all the files, documents and other resources that now threatened to overwhelm it.A young British scientist, tim burners lee working as a consultant for CERN, had the answer. His 'World Wide Web' system assigned a common system of written addresses and hypertext links to all information. Hypertext is the organisation of information units into connections that a user can make, the association is called a link.In October 1990 Berners-Lee started working on a hypertext graphical user interface (GUI) browser and editor. In 1991 the first WWW files were made available on the Internet for download using File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

By 1993 the world was starting to wake up to the World Wide Web. In October that year there were around 200 known HTTP servers. Within a year there would bethousands.May 1994 saw the first International WWW Conference - at CERN in Geneva. The event was heavily oversubscribed, with 800 applying to attend and only 400 allowedin.