Happy B-Day Internet!
This week our article is dedicated to a very important anniversary, a day in history that has forever changed our way of living and working: the birth of the Internet, which turned 51 on 21 November!
On November 21st, 1969, the first permanent connection on ARPANet was established between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. The progenitor and precursor of the Internet is, in fact, considered to be the ARPANET project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency dependent on the US Ministry of Defense. In a note dated April 25th, 1963, Joseph Licklider, one of the most important figures in the history of information technology and computing, had expressed his intention to connect all computers and time-sharing systems in a continental network. This project was later carried on by his successors.
The contract was awarded to the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) which used Honeywell’s minicomputers as support. The network was physically built in 1969 by connecting four nodes: the University of California at Los Angeles, the Stanford SRI, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The bandwidth was 50 kbps. The Internet of today is precisely the result of the extension of this first network.
In 1972, ARPANET was introduced to the public, and Ray Tomlinson, considered the inventor of email, adapted his program into it. This quickly became popular, thanks also to the contribution of Larry Roberts, who had developed the first program for managing e-mail.
The birth of the World Wide Web then takes place in 1991 at CERN in Geneva, when the researcher Tim Berners-Lee defined the HTTP protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol), the system that allows a hypertextual, non-sequential reading of documents, jumping from a point to the other through the use of hyperlinks.
On April 30th, 1993, CERN decided to make the technology underlying the World Wide Web public, making it freely implementable by anyone. This decision was followed by an immediate and widespread success of the World Wide Web, due to the functions offered, its efficiency and its ease of use.
The Internet has grown and continues to grow exponentially, in a few years it has changed the way we all live, relate and work.
If you want to know more go here!
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