By default, any definitive history of the Internet must be short, since the
Internet (in one form or another) has only been in existence for less than 30
years. The first iteration of the Internet was launched in 1971 with a public
showing in early 1972. This first network, known as ARPANET (Advanced Research
Projects Agency NETwork) was very primitive by today's standards, but a
milestone in computer communications. ARPANET was based upon the design concepts
of Larry Roberts (MIT) and was fleshed out at the first ACM symposium, held in
Gaithersburg, TN in 1966, although RFPs weren't sent out until mid 1968. The
Department of Defense in 1969 commissioned ARPANET, and the first node was
created at the University of California in Los Angeles, running on a Honeywell
DDP-516 mini-computer. The second node was established at Standford University
and launched on October first of the same year. The third node was located at
the University of California, Santa Barbara (November 1, 1969) and the fourth
was opened at the University of Utah in December. By 1971 15 nodes were linked
including BBN, CMU, CWRU, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, MIT, NASA/Ames, RAND, SDC, SRI
and UIU(C). In that same year, Larry Roberts creates the first email management
program. As a side note, Ray Tomlinson is the person who established the @ sign
as a domain/host designator from his Model 33 Teletype. The first international
connection to ARPANET is established when the University College of London is
connected in 1973, and RFC-454 File Transfer Protocol was published. 1973 Was
also the year that Dr. Robert Metcalf's doctoral thesis outlined the
specifications for Ethernet. The theory was tested on Xerox PARCs computers.
1974 saw the launch of TELNET public packet data service. UUCP (Unix-to-Unix
Copy Protocol) was developed at AT&T Bell Labs in 1976, and distributed with
UNIX the following year. 1978 saw the split of TCP into TCP and IP. In 1979 the
first MUD (Multi-User Domain) was created by Dr. Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw
from the University of Essex, and was the foundation for multi-player games
(among other things). This event marked the gradual decline of productivity ver
the Internet. In 1981 a cooperative network between CUNY (City University of New
York) and Yale was established.
This network was called BITNET (Because It's There NETwork) and was designed
to provide electronic mail transfer and listserve services between the two
institutions. RFC-801 NCP/TCP Transition Plan was published that same year. It
was because of the growing interconnectivity of new networks that the phrase
Internet was coined in 1982, and the Department of Defense also declared TCP/IP
to be its defacto standard. The first name server was developed in 1983 at the
University of Wisconsin, allowing users to access systems without having to know
the exact path to the server. 1983 also saw the transition from NCP to TCP/IP,
and it was at this same time that ARPANET was split into ARPANET and MILNET. 68
of the current 113 existing nodes were assigned to MILNET. It was also in 1983
that a young San Francisco programmer, Tom Jennings wrote the first FidoNet
Bulletin Board System, which was capable of allowing both email and message
passing over the Internet between networked BBSs by 1988. In 1984, the number of
hosts on the Internet broke 1000, and DNS (Domain Name Services was introduced.
Moderated Newsgroups also made their first appearance this year, although it
would be almost a year and a half before NNTP (Network New Transfer Protocol)
would be introduced. In 1985, the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) was
launched out of Sausalito California, allowing San Francisco Bay Area users free
access to the Internet. The Internet had grown so fast, and to such large
proportions by this time that some control was needed to oversee its expansion,
so in 1986, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research
Task Force (IRTF) came into existence under the IAB. 1988 Saw the advent of IRC
(Internet Relay Chat), developed by Jarkko Oikarinen, and it can be safely
assumed that the first Hot Chat (cyber-sex) took place very shortly afterwards.
By 1989 the number of Internet hosts had capped 100,000, and the first
commercial Internet mail service was created by MCI. In 1990, ARPANET was
finally closed down and ceased to exist. Two other notable events this year
include the release of ARCHIE by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at
McGill, and the first remotely controlled machine to be linked to the Internet;
a toaster (controlled by SNMP). 1991 was the year what WAIS (Wide Area
Information Servers), was released by Brewster Kahle, of Thinking Machines
Corporation; Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill released Gopher from the
University of Minnesota, and most notably, World-Wide Web was released by Tim
Berners-Lee of CERN. By 1992 the number of hosts on the Internet had exceeded
1,000,000 and the first MBONE audio multicast was made. In 1993 InternNIC was
created by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
