Internet History: Beyond Arpanet

The Internet’s beginnings took place in a United States Department of Defense program for a strategic computer network. It was designed to carry sensitive and critical data over a computer network that was supposed to be able to remain intact in the event of nuclear attack. The project was called ARPANET, for “Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. The ARPANET was based on a packet-switching network.

Any given unit of data could be divided into packets, and these packets could be sent computer to computer, to be reassembled by the receiver. Along the way, these packets of data were routed through various computers along the network, requiring that each computer be able to communicate with all the others. The network was designed to provide simultaneous links among all the computers on the network.

Depending on whether a given computer site on the ARPANET was busy – or perhaps taken out by a bomb – the same route might not be available for all the data packets. This was okay, because it was not necessary for all of the packets to take the same route. As long as the packets carried the information to the destination computer where it could be reassembled, any computer on the network was as good as the next. ARPANET also created certain basic network communications and control protocols known as Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol, or the ever famous TCP/IP. It simply refers to the set of rules by which computers linked to the Internet use to operate and handle the data received over a network.

The ARPANET became ever more popular and interconnected, and its user base grew by leaps and bounds. Eventually, commercial computer sites began hooking into the network as well as educational, scientific and governmental sites that had more tradition on the network. As the network grew, the military moved its portion of ARPANET to another entity, and thus the Internet was left to take shape.

In 1989, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) created a worldwide network of supercomputers to smooth the progress of access to data for doctors, physicists, and other scientists and technocrats. The CERN network quickly grew into the massive Internet area called the World Wide Web. The web is what most people today call the Internet, although there is in fact much more to it. With page-oriented documents and links to graphics, sounds, and videos, today the Internet is truly a multimedia experience.