INDEPTH: INTERNET
Birth of the internet
CBC News Online | March 7, 2006
The internet was originally conceived for the U.S. military as a means of allowing a community of computers to share information over distance. It's generally accepted that its later development was spurred on as much for research purposes as for military applications.
The body in charge of setting up the network was the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In 1967, ARPA enlisted the help of the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., to design the system. Within a year, Stanford researchers had designed a framework, which ARPA contracted out for implementation.
The first two nodes were installed at UCLA and Stanford Research Institute in August of 1969, but it wasn't until two months later that the machines made first contact.
On October 29, 1969, at 10:30 p.m., UCLA engineering professor Leonard Kleinrock and student Charley Kline attempted to send a message from one Honeywell computer to a similar unit 600 kilometres away at Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto. The connection speed was 50 kb/s.
The first message was supposed to be the word "login," but the system crashed as they typed in the letter "g." The first message, then, was "lo." Although it was a bumpy – if not prophetic – beginning, the researchers were able to complete the message one hour later.
And so the ARPANET (the term internet was not coined until 1982) was born.
Evolution of the internet
Oct. 29, 1969
The first message (the letters "l" and "o") is sent over ARPANET.
Dec. 1969
The University of Utah and University of California Santa Barbara now have ARPANET nodes, bringing the worldwide total to four.
1970
ARPANET has grown to 10 nodes and 19 host computers.
1971
The world's first network e-mail system is created.
1973
Hawaii joins ARPANET via the network's first satellite link.
1974
Telenet, the first commercially available version of ARPANET, is introduced by Bolt - Beranek & Newman (BBN).
1977
ARPANET grows to 111 hosts.
1980
A virus temporarily disables ARPANET.
1982
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) established as system by which different networks can communicate. These linked networks come to be known as the internet.
1984
ARPANET grows to 1,000 hosts.
1985
All Canadian Universities are now connected to a shared network known as NetNorth.
1988
Canada joins NSFNET, an international backbone of computing centres that enables more network connections.
1989
the World Wide Web (WWW) is created by Tim Berners-Lee of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN)
there are 100,000 internet hosts worldwide
1990
ARPANET ceases to function, giving way to the internet
Tim Berners-Lee authors the first browser-editor, called WorldWideWeb. He also authors the communication language of the internet - Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as well as the standard by which web pages were to be written, known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
1992
The first audio and video is broadcast over the internet, which now has one million hosts.
1993
There are 15 million people online worldwide and the CBC's Bill Cameron reports, "The internet is growing like an embryonic brain at a rate of 10 per cent a month."
Oct. 1994
Netscape releases the beta version of the world's first commercially available web browser - Mozilla 0.96b.
1995
Sun Microsystems introduces Java programming language
RealAudio is introduced, allowing users to listen to audio over the internet in near-real time
CBC goes online with its website
the Vatican goes online with its home page
Sept. 1998
Search engine Google introduced
2002
There are more than two million internet hosts and 840 million users worldwide
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