Amer Neely
Web Mechanic

Note: This article was written in 1998 and has not been updated.

As much as the Internet has been a popular topic for the past few years, very few people know it actually was born in the late-1950's! Some would say even as far back as 1945, to "As We May Think", an essay by Vannevar Bush in 'The Atlantic Monthly'!. Read about his 'memex' device, the fore-runner of today's World Wide Web.

We must go back to 1957 in fact, when Russia launched Sputnik, the first earth satellite. The US response was to create a new research department in the Department of Defense to focus on scientific and technological applications for the military. The new department was called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The military / industrial complex has always had a close relationship with research universities, so it was only natural that a close relationship was developed with some major universities.

The major focus of this agency was to find a way to link wide-spread computers in such a way that if a terrorist attack or atomic bomb destroyed one link, traffic would be re-routed with no data loss.

In 1962 Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation wrote the first paper on packet-switching networks. This was a revolutionary method of sending data between computers using "data packets" instead of one steady stream. The idea was to break up the data into smaller chunks and use multiple paths to send them to their destination. At the receiving end, they would get reassembled back into their original order.

By 1969 four US universities were networked together using packet-switching, and two years later there were 15 nodes, with 23 hosts. At this time, the network was known as ARPANET. A host is a smaller computer, such as a university department might have, connected to a node, being the main university computer.

Telnet was first established in 1972 as a means to allow a user to remotely connect to another computer. A year later, ftp (file transfer protocol) was developed as another remote access utility allowing users to transfer files back and forth rapidly.

The next member of the "Internet suite" was the creation of Usenet in 1979. This was a service by which users could post messages to a public bulletin board on any manner of topics. There was a different "newsgroup" for each topic, and it quickly became an excellent resource for researchers. Bear in mind the users of the network at this time were still mostly academics.

It wasn't until 1982 that the term "internet" came into play to refer to a connected set of networks, and the "Internet" referred to a set of connected internets. These networks were based on TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol), first mentioned in 1974 by Vint Cerf, affectionately known as "the father of the Internet". This protocol was so stable that the US Dept. of Defense declared it the standard for all military networks. It quickly became the de facto standard for the rest of the Internet as well.

Things were really moving quickly in the 1980's and a lot was developed. In 1984 the first Domain Name Server (DNS) was introduced. Now users could enter an English-like name instead of a string of numbers when contacting another computer. This was a good thing, as the number of hosts on the Internet was more than 1,000 at the time.

This led to the first back-bone being created by the National Science Foundation (NSF) at a speed of 56Kbps (56 kilobits per second) in 1986. Five super-computing centres were connected to it across the US, and from these an explosion of other connections arose, mostly from universities. NSF would become the manager of this network (NFSNET), and the Internet at large. Speaking of large, in 1987 the number of hosts on the Internet broke 10,000.

Just so we don't forget the dark side, the famous "Internet Worm" was released in 1988 by Robert Morris. This particular bit of nastiness took advantage of a hole in some of the Internet software, and eventually ended up affecting over 6,000 computers on the Internet.

Also this year the NSF upgraded their backbone to 1.544 Mbps (megabits per second) or T1. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was born in 1988 and Canada was one of seven countries connected to NSFNET, along with Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

One year later, 1989, marks the publication of "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll. He tells his real story about tracking down a hacker in Germany who broke into a large number of US and Canadian research and military computing facilities. Stoll noticed a $0.75 difference in the accounting report for a particular computer user, which led him to the discovery. The number of hosts on the Internet breaks the 100,000 mark.

Finally into the nineties. ARPANET was put to rest and CA*net was born in 1990. This was the Canadian backbone directly connected to NSFNET. Archie (archive without the "v") was released from McGill University as a search engine for ftp sites. The year also saw the birth of the Internet Toaster, the first non-computing device to be remotely accessible over the Internet. Eleven more countries were connected to NSFNET (Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Greece, India, Ireland, South Korea, Spain, and Switzerland).

In 1991 we see the first hint of commercial interest with the formation of CIX (Commercial Internet eXchange). This was in response to NFS lifting the restrictions on commercial activity on the Internet. Other notable events in 1991 were the introduction of Gopher, a text-based hierarchical system of information delivery; NSFNET increased the backbone speed to T3 (44.736 Mbps); Philip Zimmerman introduced PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), an unbreakable encryption system used world-wide; and, oh yes, the World Wide Web (WWW) was developed by Tim Berners-Lee and released into the wild. This was to be the biggest push the Internet received since its birth, but remember, everything was still text!

Veronica, the gopherspace search engine, was released in 1992. Over 1,000,000 hosts now made up the Internet. The year also was responsible for the term "surfing the Internet", first coined by Jean Armour Polly.

The biggest year for the Internet was 1993 with the introduction of Mosaic, the first graphical interface. Traffic increased exponentially, as did the number of hosts connecting. The need generated the establishment of InterNIC by NSF to handle registering the huge number of sites.

Within a year the web has grabbed everyone. Pizza Hut came online in 1994, as did the first shopping malls, the first bank, and radio station (RT-FM in Las Vegas). This was also the year of the famous "Canter & Siegel" spamming of millions of Internet users with unwanted email. Only a few years old and the WWW is now the 2nd most popular service on the Internet, after ftp.

1995 sees The Vatican and the Canadian government going online. Multimedia is rampant on the 'net, and RealAudio introduces streaming audio technology, which allows users to hear voice transmissions in almost real-time. The other online services (CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy) establish gateways to the Internet, seeing it as a huge cash cow.

Developments in other areas in 1995 resulted in the first official Internet wire tap by the Secret Service and Drug Enforcement Agency. NSFNET no longer manages the Internet, going back to its research roots. The Internet is now managed by a collection of commercial network providers. Growth of the WWW exceeds ftp traffic, becoming the number one service.

Notable in 1996 were the elimation of about 25,000 messages in the Usenet by a program called a "cancelbot". Other hackers managed to get into and change various US government sites (CIA, Department of Justice, US Air Force). The 2600 club has a list of hacked sites. On the bright side, search engines made their debut, as did JAVA, a platform-independent programming language touted as being the be-all and end-all Internet "killer-app".

Last year saw some interesting items: a Canadian site had the longest domain name registered with InterNIC: CHALLENGER.MED.SYNAPSE.UAH.UALBERTA.CA; millions of sites whose domains ended in .com and .net were suddenly unreachable the morning of July 17 after human error corrupted the DNS database.

And so far this year, we had the first televised sporting event to have its contestants judged by Internet viewers. On March 27 world champion figure skaters had their performances determined by viewers. And the US Postal Service offers stamps online - download 'em and print 'em! Where will it ever end?