The Internet is, without exaggeration, the main technological breakthrough of the last decades. But by whom and when was it invented? In fact, the invention of the Internet is a rather complicated story, and we will deal with it in this post.
The first projects of the Internet
For the first time, ideas and projects for a global computer network appeared in the early 1960s. In 1962 in the USA, Joseph Licklider, who was then working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a series of notes in which he described the concept of the "Galactic Network". The name was a joke, and Licklider saw the main purpose of this network in the convenient exchange of data and program code, but his concept did describe some of the principles of a global computer network that resembled the modern Internet. Soon Likladyer became the head of the information technology department of DARPA, and largely thanks to his efforts, after some time, this agency begins to implement the project of one of the first computer networks ARPANET.
V. M. Glushkov
In the same 1962, an article by academician Kharkevich was published in the Soviet Union, in which he wrote about the need to create a nationwide computer network that would allow all institutions to exchange information and become the basis for planning and management in various industries. Soon, Academician Glushkov came up with an even more detailed project, called OGAS (National State Automated System for Accounting and Processing Information). The project envisaged the creation of a single computer network in the USSR, within the framework of the project it was planned to create 6,000 computer centers and train 300 thousand IT specialists. Khrushchev approved the plan and its implementation began, but after Brezhnev came to power, the Soviet bureaucracy began to openly sabotage the project. Instead of a single network, the Soviet ministries began to build their own computer centers, not connected to each other, and attempts to integrate them into a network did not go beyond experiments. So the USSR missed the opportunity to overtake the West in the field of information technology.
OGAS Glushkova
ARPANET
In 1964, two years later than in the USSR, the implementation of the ARPANET network project was launched in the USA. But, unlike the USSR, this project was brought to an end there. In 1969, this network began to work, although at first there were only 4 nodes in it.
ARPANET in 1969
Later, many began to consider this year the year of the Internet. But in fact, the ARPANET network was quite far from the modern Internet. The main problem that they tried to solve with the help of this network was the problem of optimal use of computer power. Computers were still quite expensive, and if someone could remotely connect from another computer and use its power during idle time, it would turn out to be a big savings. Due to various difficulties, this task was never realized, but ARPANET continued to develop.
Larry Roberts
In 1972, Larry Roberts, one of the developers of ARPANET, who by that time had succeeded Licklider as director of the DARPA IT department, organized an international conference on computer communications in Washington. At this conference, a demonstration of ARPANET was held, during which those who wished could connect to 20 computers from different US cities and execute various commands on them. At the time, the demonstration made a big impression on skeptics who did not believe in the reality of computer networks.
In 1972, e-mail appeared on the ARPANET. E-mail messaging soon became one of the most popular features of ARPANET. Some even believe that e-mail "saved" ARPANET, making this network really useful and in demand. Then other ways to use the network began to appear - file transfer, instant messaging, bulletin boards, etc. However, ARPANET was not yet the Internet. And the first obstacle to the further development of the network was the lack of a universal protocol that would allow computers of different types and with different software to exchange information.
TCP/IP protocol
The variety of hardware and software made it difficult to network computers. To overcome them, in 1973 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn decided to create a universal information exchange protocol that would allow connecting a variety of computers and local networks.
Vinton ("Vint") Cerf
Robert ("Bob") Kahn
The protocol was named TCP (Transmission-Control Protocol, or Transmission Control Protocol). Later, the protocol was divided into two parts and was called TCP / IP (IP - Internet Protocol). By the way, at the same time, around the mid-70s, the word “Internet” itself appeared.
The development of the protocol took quite a long time. Initially, many doubted that small computers were even capable of supporting such a complex protocol. Only in 1977 was the first data transmission using this protocol demonstrated. And ARPANET switched to the new protocol only in 1983.
And in 1984, the first DNS server was launched, which allowed using domain names instead of poorly remembered IP addresses.
Development of computer networks and the end of ARPANET
In the late 70s, the first personal computers designed for home use appeared. In the 80s, more and more such computers began to appear, and computer networks also developed at the same time. Along with state and scientific networks, commercial and amateur networks appeared, to which it was possible to connect via a modem through a telephone line. However, the functions of computer networks were still rather limited and were limited mainly to sending e-mail and exchanging messages and files via bulletin boards (BBS). It was still not the internet we were used to.
ARPANET, which at one time served as an impetus for the development of computer networks, fell into decay, and in 1989 this network was closed. The Pentagon, which financed DARPA, did not really need it, and the military segment of this network was separated from the civilian one in the early 80s. At the same time, the alternative global network NSFNET, created in 1984 by the US National Science Foundation, was actively developing. This network originally united American universities. In the mid-80s, this network began to use high-speed data lines for the first time with a data transfer rate of 1.5 Mbps instead of 56 Kbps, which was the standard for modems and telephone lines. In the late 80s, the remnants of ARPANET became part of NSFNET, and NSFNET itself in the early 90s will become the core of the global Internet. This will happen, however, not immediately, since the network was originally focused on use only for scientific and educational purposes, but then these restrictions were nevertheless removed. In 1994, NSFNET was effectively privatized and fully open to commercial use.
www
But in order for the Internet to become the way we know it, in addition to computer networks and a universal protocol, something else had to be invented. That something was site organization technology. It was she who made the Internet truly popular and massive.
Tim Berners-Lee
In 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee was working on a document viewing system at CERN (the famous international center for nuclear research in Switzerland). And then it occurred to him to implement a large-scale project based on the hypertext markup that he used in documents. The project was given the name World Wide Web ("World Wide Web").
For 2 years, Tim Berners-Lee worked hard on the project. During this time, he developed the HTML language for creating web pages, a way to set page addresses as URLs, the HTTP protocol, and the first browser.
August 6, 1991 Tim Berners-Lee posted the first website on the Internet. It contained basic information about WWW technology, how to view documents, how to download a browser.
So the first users saw the world's first website
In 1993, the first browser with a graphical interface appeared. In the same year, CERN issued a statement announcing that WWW technology would not be protected by any copyright and its free use was allowed to anyone. This wise decision led to an explosion in the number of sites on the web and the emergence of the Internet as we know it today. As early as 1995, the WWW became the most used service of all (e-mail, file transfer, etc.), and for today's users it is almost synonymous with the Internet.
So who invented the internet? The Internet was not invented by one person. But of those who made the greatest personal contribution to its appearance, the following people can be distinguished.
- The initiators and developers of ARPANET. Among them are such people as Joseph Licklider, Larry Roberts, and Paul Baran And Bob Taylor.
- Creators of the TCP/IP protocol: Screw Surf And Bob Kahn.
- WWW Creator Tim Berners-Lee.
The emergence of Runet
The first computer networks in the USSR appeared long ago, even earlier than in the West. The first experiments in this area date back to 1952, and in 1960 a network was already deployed in the USSR that united computers within the framework of an anti-missile defense system. Later, specialized civil networks appeared, designed, for example, to account for railway and air tickets. Unfortunately, there were big problems with the development of general purpose networks due to pervasive bureaucracy.
In the 1980s, Soviet scientists for the first time began to connect to foreign networks, at first only occasionally, for example, to hold some kind of conferences on scientific topics. In 1990, the first Soviet computer network "Relcom" appeared, uniting scientific institutions from different cities of the USSR. Its creation was carried out by employees of the Institute of Atomic Energy. Kurchatov. In the same year, the su zone was registered - the domain zone of the Soviet Union (the ru zone appeared only in 1994). In autumn 1990 Relcom establishes the first connections with foreign countries. In 1992, Relcom implements the TCP/IP protocol and establishes a connection to the European EUnet network. Runet becomes a full-fledged part of the Internet.
The Internet has become an indispensable part of our lives. In just 5 years, the Internet, or as we also call it, the World Wide Web or the Global Network has become popular among millions of people. Now many of us cannot imagine life without this brilliant invention. Have you ever thought about who we are grateful for such an interesting and useful thing? Who Invented the Internet? Who is the creator of the Global Network? And why was the Internet invented in the first place?
Here's how it all started...In 1957, the US Department of Defense first thought about the reliable transmission of information. It was necessary to create such a system for transmitting messages that even in the event of a nuclear war, this system did not fail. The US Defense Research Projects Agency came up with the idea of using computers as sources for receiving and transmitting information. And for this it was necessary to develop a computer network. Four US universities were commissioned to implement the idea: the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Utah, the University of Santa Barbara and the Stanford Research Center.
And in 1969, a talented group of scientists created a computer network called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which united these 4 universities.
By 1973, the ARPANET had become international. Organizations from Norway and Great Britain connected to the network using a transatlantic telephone cable. By the end of the 70s, they began to actively work on the standardization of data protocols, which were successfully standardized in 1982-1983.
John Postel took an active part in the development of network protocols. Since Jon Postel is the author of many network protocols that are still in use today: IP, ICMP, TCP, FTP, DNS, many people call him the man who created the Internet or the father of the Internet.
By early 1983, after the ARPANET switched to the newly created TCP / IP network interconnection protocol, the name that we now successfully use, “Internet”, was assigned to it.
All this time the computer network was available to a limited number of people. And only in 1991, after the standardization of the WWW (World Wide Web) pages, the World Wide Web becomes a public invention of the United States.
So in what year was the Internet created?
As you understand, in what year the Internet was invented cannot be answered unambiguously. Because the very concept of "Internet" and our modern World Wide Web appeared much later than the very idea of \u200b\u200bcreation and its predecessor, the ARPANET. But these questions can be combined with the following question: who and when invented and created the first Internet? In 1957, the idea came to the mind of specialists from DARPA (US Defense Research Projects Agency) and 12 years later, a group of talented university scientists created the first computer network ARPANET. And in what year our modern Internet was created, you can determine for yourself - in 
1983, when the very concept of "Internet" appeared, or in 1991, when the network became public domain.
In conclusion, we can say that it is impossible to single out one single person from the circle of people who worked on the creation of the World Wide Web and invented the Internet. Mankind was moving towards this discovery gradually, even Nikola Tesla in 1908, speaking about the idea of using electrical information communication, predicted the emergence of the Global Network: “When the project is completed, a businessman in New York will be able to dictate instructions, and they will immediately appear in his office in London .... In the same way, any image, symbol, drawing, text can be transferred from one place to another ... And most importantly, all this will be transmitted wirelessly ... "
Today, the Internet has firmly entered our lives, almost every home or phone has it. But many do not even suspect when the Internet appeared. And you need to know this, because at any time your child can ask about what the Internet is and the date of its appearance.
Today, the concept of the Internet means an international system of computer networks based on IP protocols and their routing. If you look at Wikipedia, you can see that at the end of 2015, 2.4 billion users were connected to the Internet. This is 34.5% of the inhabitants of the entire earth. Russia is in 4th place in terms of the number of Internet users, after China, the USA and India. Today, the Internet is used for various tasks: sending e-mail, watching movies, reading books, listening to music. In business: transfer of official information, etc. So let's find out when the Internet appeared in the world, and when it originated in Russia.
ARPANET is the first version of the Internet.
Whoever said what, but the cold war between the USSR and the USA served as a strong impetus for the development of new technologies. Nuclear weapons, space flights, the development of new technologies are all consequences of the Cold War.
The emerging threat from the USSR and its intercontinental missiles made the US government think about creating reliable communication channels in case of war. As a result of discussions, DARPA (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) proposed to organize a computer communication network. 4 universities undertook its creation:
- California State University;
- University of Utah;
- University of California at Los Angeles;
- Stanford Research Center.
Funding fell on the shoulders of the US Department of Defense.
In 1961 Leonard Kleinrock (American engineer and scientist in the field of information technology and computer networks) publishes a scientific paper on the possibility of splitting files into parts and transmitting them in packets over a network. It forms the basis for the development of DARPA specialists.
After 8 years, October 29, 1969 year for the first time two servers were connected to each other. The servers were located at a distance of 640 kilometers from each other. Due to the successful transfer of files at the time of communication, this date is considered to be the date when the Internet appeared. The network was named ARPANET.
1971 gives the world a new technology in the form of e-mail. This year, Ray Tomlinson is developing the first program that allows you to send mail messages over the network. It was he who suggested using the @ sign (dogs) in postal addresses.
1972 marked by the first international connections between England and Norway. The first satellite communication was also launched. And this year, the FTP protocol (file transfer protocol) appears.
1983 was marked by a new significant event, the emergence of the current TCP / IP data transfer protocol. At present, we are all bound by this protocol. Thanks to the transition to this communication protocol, the ARPANET computer network changed its name to the name we know: "Internet".
1984, there is a competing network NSFNet (National Science Foundation Network) with a higher bandwidth.
1988, the emergence of another IRC protocol, thanks to which we now have the opportunity to communicate in real time.
1989, proposed a new concept for the creation of the World Wide Web, based on the Hypertext Language (HTML), HTTP protocols and URL identifiers. In 1991, the World Wide Web (WWW) service appears, working on the proposed concept. Tim Berners-Lee is considered to be the inventor of the World Wide Web.
Thanks to the advent of the World Wide Web, the first MOSAIC browser appears. The ease of use of www leads to an increase in the popularity of the Internet among users and in 1996 the concept of the World Wide Web changes to what we use every day - the Internet.
When did the Internet appear in Russia.
The Russian Internet appears much later than in the USA. First network connection fixed August 22, 1990 Institute of Nuclear Energy and IPK Minavtoprom.
September 19, 1990— the first Soviet domain SU was registered in the international database of domains.
There are many opinions about who exactly invented the Internet. Even several people are called the "parents" of the World Wide Web. The well-known media figure Gordon Krovitz considered it necessary to present his version of the birth.
"Who Invented the Internet?" asked former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz. And he answered it from the pages of the same publication. One of the most common versions says that the Internet was created by order of the US government for military purposes, but this legend has little to do with the truth, Krovitz wrote.
The creation of the Internet by the US government is just one of the urban legends. "The myth goes that the Pentagon created the Internet because it was necessary to keep in touch even in the event of a nuclear strike," writes Krovitz.
According to the official version, in the 50s of the last century, in the conditions of the Cold War, the US Department of Defense thought about the need to create a reliable, trouble-free information transmission system. As one option, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now DARPA) proposed the development of a computer network. The project was entrusted to four organizations: the Universities of California, Santa Barbara, Utah and the Stanford Research Center. It was they who created the ARPAnet network. The work began in 1957, and only 12 years later - in 1969 - the network connected the computers of the listed universities.
However, the very idea of the Internet appeared earlier, reminds Krovitz. During World War II, US President Theodore Roosevelt's science adviser, Vannevar Bush, was part of the Manhattan Project [the code name for the US nuclear weapons program]. Later, in 1946, he wrote the article "How We Can Think", in which he proposed the prototype of a device that could "expand human memory" - Memex. This device was presented as a kind of "repository" for all human knowledge, amenable to a formal description, and capable of quickly finding and issuing the necessary information. Many tech-savvy people see the Memex description as a prediction of the advent of the Internet.
Of course, at that time it was perceived by many as the fruit of a wild imagination. But already in the late sixties, engineers tried to combine several communication networks into one "global" network, that is, in fact, to create a prototype of the "World Wide Web". As Gordon Krovitz writes, the federal government's involvement in this project was modest - through the ARPA agency. But the goal of the project was not to maintain communication during a nuclear attack, and, in fact, ARPAnet was not pro-Internet, if the Internet is understood as the connection of two or more computer networks, Robert Taylor, who led the project at ARPA in the 60s, said in 2004.
“But if the Internet was not invented by the government, then by whom?” Gordon Krovitz continues to ask. Vinton Cerf created the TCP / IP protocol, the basis of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee became the "father of the World Wide Web", embodying the idea of hyperlinks.
But the main merit belongs to the company where Robert Taylor moved after working at ARPA - Xerox. It was in the Xerox PARC laboratory, located in Silicon Valley, that Ethernet technology was developed in 1970, designed to transfer data between different computer networks. As is known today, the Xerox Alto personal computer and graphical user interface were developed in the same laboratory.
Michael Hiltzik's book Dealers of Lightning, which tells the story of Xerox PARC, also provides information about the creation of Ethernet. At some point, the leading researchers of the laboratory realized that the government was too busy with other things to care about connecting various computer networks to a single network. Therefore, they had to deal with this issue on their own. At the same time, Xerox PARC employees blamed ARPA, which, receiving government funding, worked, in their opinion, too slowly.
Later, in one of his letters, Robert Taylor wrote: "I believe that the Internet was created at Xerox PARC, around 1975, when we connected Ethernet and ARPAnet through PUP (PARC Universal Protocol)."
So, the Internet was created at Xerox PARC. "But why didn't Xerox become the world's largest company then?" - the author of the article asks another question. The answer is simple and obvious: the company's management was too focused on the core business to notice innovative developments and calculate their potential.
The Xerox executives, who were at the company's headquarters in Rochester, New York, were too focused on selling copiers. From their point of view, Ethernet could only be used so that people in the same office could link multiple computers to share a copier.
Many people know the story of how in 1979 the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, came to Xerox PARC for ideas - he concluded an agreement with the Xerox management, under which he could get access to any innovative developments of the laboratory. "They just didn't know what they were," Jobs later said, who made Apple a great company, thanks in part to developments carried over from Xerox.
However, the sale of copiers brought Xerox profit for decades. The name of the company has even become synonymous with the copier. But Xerox missed the moment, and in the era of the digital revolution, company managers can only console themselves with the thought that only a few succeed in successfully moving from one technological era to another.
In 1995, the development of the Internet completely came under the control of commercial companies. The part of the network that was controlled by the supercomputers of the US National Science Foundation was left with only its own narrow niche. Starting this year, the commercial Internet began to grow at an explosive pace, although before that it had been “languishing” under government control for almost 30 years. In less than 10 years, companies have achieved a real technological revolution, which, according to Gordon Krovitz, once again proves the greater role of business than government.
To build a successful technology business, you need to have both the disruptive technology and the specific skills to bring it to market. The contrast between Apple and Xerox shows that few business leaders can succeed when faced with such a daunting task. It is to them, and not to the government, that the main merit belongs.
The Internet was born as a result of the confrontation between the USSR and the USA. In America, they believed that the USSR was about to attack them, and then back in 1957, the Soviets launched a satellite. Absolutely trouble! And they decided in the States that in case of war it is imperative to have some kind of uninterrupted communication system for early warning of a missile attack. Work on a new communication system called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was assigned to several universities.
First steps
The first real result was obtained in 1969, on October 29th. It was on this day at 9 pm that the first successful communication attempt was made between the universities at Stanford and Los Angeles. Operator Charlie Kline in Los Angeles managed to connect to the Stanford computer and transmit the code word.
October 1969
The first e-mail program appeared in 1971 and immediately gained popularity in the United States.
In the 70s, mainly mail was transmitted over the network, there were bulletin boards. At that time, several disparate networks were already operating in the world, each operating according to its own protocol. The question arose about the unification of the data transfer process. Work in this direction began in 1973. Project leader Robert Kahn unveiled several principles by which a shared network should operate:
- Internet connection should not lead to internal alterations;
- if the information has not reached the addressee, it must be transmitted again;
- simple gateways and routers should be used for connection;
- there is no common network management system.
Robert Kahn.
In the course of working on the creation of a common network, the TCP / IP protocol (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol - Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) was developed. These principles and protocol for the functioning of the network are still in effect today. The transition of all computers on the ARPANET to the TCP / IP protocol occurred in 1983. Then for the first time the ARPANET was called the Internet.
However, in 1984, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) founded a new inter-university network NSFNet (English National Science Foundation Network), created from several smaller ones. As NSFNet's audience grew faster than ARPANET, the name Internet passed to it. This year was also marked by the emergence of the Domain Name System, DNS.
Internet in the USSR
The first transatlantic ARPANET cable from the US to Europe was laid in 1973, connecting England, Sweden and several other countries. The USSR was late, as usual, for a decade. The first Soviet computers connected to European networks in 1982. Then the employees of the All-Union Research Institute of Applied Automated Systems established a permanent communication channel with the Vienna Institute for System Analysis.
It was a purely scientific channel. The network of the Academy of Sciences began to form from it. She was not public. Only scientists could connect to it, but Western scientific libraries with dissertations, monographs, etc. became available to them. In 1989, in the USSR, employees of the Kurchatov Institute, the Ministry of Automotive Industry began to create local networks and help other citizens connect to them.
Only when cooperatives were allowed did the Relcom network appear from the Demos cooperative, but this happened already in 1990. In the same year, the SU domain belonging to the Soviet Union was registered. The process of network commercialization has begun. By the way, before the collapse of the USSR, commercial conferences helped to stabilize prices, as they were a direct source of information about where and how much. Unfortunately, these same networks played a significant role in the brain drain.
In August 1991, the Soviet Internet was one of the few channels that transmitted all the news in real time, including those that Muscovites saw with their own eyes from the windows of their apartments. These days, a huge number of servers all over the USSR connected to Relcom.
The period of the formation of the worldwide network
Popular in the 90s, the Mosaic web browser was developed in 1993 by the NCSA.
Since 1995, network providers began to route network traffic, thus freeing up NSFNet university supercomputers for scientific work. At the same time, the World Wide Web Consortium W3C was created to streamline web standards. Since 1996, the WWW protocol has overtaken FTP in terms of traffic.
The combination of the http web protocol and the Mosaic web browser has contributed to the growth of the Internet. Two years after the advent of the browser, the Internet became known throughout the world. During these years, most of the networks that existed separately merged with the Internet, and those that proudly stood aside, like Fidonet, gradually faded away.
In 1994, the SU domain stopped registering new users as Russia received the RU domain. The SU domain was recommended to be slowly phased out and liquidated. However, despite the termination of registration and the recommendation to “liquidate”, the domain continued to exist semi-legally and slowly develop, until, finally, already in the 2000s, its activity was completely legalized.
By 1997, about 10 million computers were connected to the Internet around the world, more than 1 million domain names were registered. Since that time, the Internet began to turn into one of the most popular sources of information and gradually acquired a modern look.
In Russia, by 1997, the first Internet newspapers had already appeared, the Yandex.ru search engine had appeared, and hackers began to operate. True, the entire Russian Internet or Runet, as they began to call it, could easily fit on one hard drive of a modern computer. Search engines needed to find at least some information on request, therefore, any well-written article automatically got into the TOP of the results. Golden times!
The Current State of the World Wide Web
In 1998, the Pope authorized World Internet Day. The official patron saint has not yet been announced, but by default they consider Isidore of Seville, a Spanish bishop of the 6th-7th centuries, the first encyclopedist, and this significant holiday is celebrated on April 4, on the day of Isidore's ascension.
True, each country has appointed its own Internet Day. There are two such days in Russia. Runet's birthday is celebrated on April 7th. But the Moscow firm IT Infoart Stars sent letters to users with two proposals:
- consider September 30 as International Internet Day and celebrate it annually;
- conduct an all-Russian census of the Internet population.
In recent years, the Internet has spread very actively in Russia, overtaking everyone in this indicator. True, now China has pushed us, the Internet in which is spreading even faster.
But this is not smart. For example, in Moscow, broadband Internet is available to almost everyone; the market has reached saturation. The reserve is available only in the rest of Russia: there, half of the households still live without the Internet. But many are switching to mobile devices. We have three domains at our disposal: .su, .ru and .rf
Statistics say that, for example, in 2009, the Internet brought 1.6% (19.3 billion dollars) to Russia's GDP, about the same as Spain or Italy (as a percentage). According to forecasts, in 2015 the contribution of the network economy to Russia's GDP should reach 3.7%.
