Where Everything Started: The History Of The Internet

The need for the Internet arose from two things: universities wanted to be able to exchange information freely and the military was concerned about keeping their networks going in case of a major war. The history of the internet evolves around this research.

The initial development took place at the universities. They began to write network protocols that made it less difficult to exchange files between a server at one university and another. The military also took part in the research, because they had a vested interest in the outcome as far as network security was concerned.

These early rather basic networks were not intended for public use at all. They were used exclusively by researchers at the universities and by computer experts. The underlying idea remained the sharing of files between members of the network, so information could be accessible by all of them at the same time.

One such file sharing service was called FTP (File Transfer Protocol). It has been used for a couple of decades now and is still in use today. If you have your own website it's highly likely you have also used FTP to upload your website files to the server of your hosting company.

The development at the universities during the 1980s and 1990s were mainly concerned with the development of a menu system, so anyone could easily get a list of the available files and then make a choice by either typing in the file name or selecting it.

A meteoric step forward in the whole process was when researchers at CERN (The European Laboratory for Partical Physics) in Switzerland formulated the principles of the hypertext protocol. This fancy sounding name was what resulted in the establishment of the World Wide Web during 1991. You use it every day when you surf the web: it enables you to click on a link on any page and be taken to the other page within seconds. It still drives the whole web as we know it.

The next major step ahead was when the web browser was introduced during 1993. The first generally available browser was called Mosaic. Suddenly anyone could log on to the 'Net and access vast numbers of files simply by clicking on the hyperlinks embedded in a file. You could now also type in a domain name in the address bar, for example that of your university, and go to all the files they wanted to share with the word in a few seconds. Soon after Mosaic, Netscape introduced their Navigator and Microsoft followed soon afterwards with Internet Explorer.

The early web was not planned to be for commercial use. The scientists and researchers wanted it to be for the exchange of information between non profit networks only. They could not win the fight; the first commercial networks appeared on the scene during the '90s and soon there were numerous private networks offering email accounts and web browsing. The history of the Internet is still unfolding at this very moment and we are privileged to be part of something that changed the world so profoundly.

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