History of the Internet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Commemorative plaque listing some of the early Internet pioneers

Before the wide spread of internetworking (802.1) that led to the Internet, most communication networks
were limited by their nature to only allow communications between the stations on the local network and
the prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe computer model. Several
research programs began to explore and articulate principles of networking between physically separate
networks, leading to the development of the packet switching model of digital networking. These research
efforts included those of the laboratories of Donald Davies (NPL), Paul Baran (RAND Corporation),
and Leonard Kleinrock at MIT and at UCLA. The research led to the development of several packetswitched networking solutions in the late 1960s and 1970s, including ARPANET and the X.25 protocols.
Additionally, public access and hobbyist networking systems grew in popularity, including unix-to-unix
copy (UUCP) and FidoNet. They were however still disjointed separate networks, served only by
limited gateways between networks. This led to the application of packet switching to develop a protocol
for internetworking, where multiple different networks could be joined together into a super-framework of
networks. By defining a simple common network system, the Internet Protocol Suite, the concept of the
network could be separated from its physical implementation. This spread of internetworking began to
form into the idea of a global network that would be called the Internet, based on standardized protocols
officially implemented in 1982. Adoption and interconnection occurred quickly across the advanced
telecommunication networks of the western world, and then began to penetrate into the rest of the world
as it became the de-facto international standard for the global network. However, the disparity of growth
between advanced nations and the third-world countries led to a digital divide that is still a concern today.
Following commercialization and introduction of privately run Internet service providers in the 1980s, and
the Internet's expansion for popular use in the 1990s, the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and
commerce. This includes the rise of near instant communication by electronic mail (e-mail), text based

discussion forums, and theWorld Wide Web. Investor speculation in new markets provided by these
innovations would also lead to the inflation and subsequent collapse of the Dot-com bubble. But despite
this, the Internet continues to grow, driven by commerce, greater amounts of online information and
knowledge and social networking known as Web 2.0.
History of computing
Hardware before 1960
Hardware 1960s to present
Hardware in Soviet Bloc countries

Artificial intelligence
Computer science
Operating systems
Programming languages
Software engineering

Graphical user interface

Internet
Personal computers
Laptops
Video games
World Wide Web

Timeline of computing

2400 BC1949

19501979

19801989

19901999

20002009

More timelines...

More...
Contents
[hide]

1 Three terminals and an ARPA

2 Packet switching

3 Networks that led to the Internet

3.1 ARPANET

3.2 X.25 and public access

3.3 UUCP

3.4 NPL

4 Merging the networks and creating the Internet

4.1 TCP/IP

4.2 ARPANET to several federal wide area networks: MILNET, NSI, and NSFNet

4.3 Transition towards the Internet

5 TCP/IP becomes worldwide

5.1 CERN, the European Internet, the link to the Pacific and beyond

5.2 Digital divide

5.2.1 Africa

5.2.2 Asia and Oceania

5.2.3 Latin America

6 Opening the network to commerce

6.1 Internet Engineering Task Force

6.2 NIC, InterNIC, IANA and ICANN

6.3 Globalization and 21st century

7 Use and culture

7.1 E-mail and Usenet

7.2 From gopher to the WWW

7.3 Search engines

7.4 Dot-com bubble

7.5 Online population forecast

7.6 Mobile phones and the Internet

8 Historiography

9 See also

10 References

11 Further reading

12 External links

[edit]Three

terminals and an ARPA

Main articles: RAND and ARPANET

In the 1950s and early 1960s, before the widespread inter-networking that led to the Internet, most
communication networks were limited in that they only allowed communications between the stations on
the network. Some networks had gateways or bridges between them, but these bridges were often limited
or built specifically for a single use. One prevalent computer networking method was based on the
central mainframe method, simply allowing its terminals to be connected via long leased lines. This
method was used in the 1950s by Project RAND to support researchers such as Herbert Simon,
atCarnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when collaborating across the continent with
researchers in Sullivan, Illinois, on automated theorem proving and artificial intelligence.
A fundamental pioneer in the call for a global network, J.C.R. Licklider, articulated the ideas in his
January 1960 paper, Man-Computer Symbiosis.
"A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines [which provided] the
functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other]
symbiotic functions."
J.C.R. Licklider, [1]

In August, 1962, Licklider and Welden Clark published the paper "On-Line Man Computer
Communication", one of the first descriptions of a networked future.
In October, 1962, Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina as Director of the newly established IPTO
within DARPA, with a mandate to interconnect the United States Department of Defense's main
computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and SAC HQ. There he formed an informal group within
DARPA to further computer research. He began by writing memos describing a distributed network to the
IPTO staff, whom he called "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network". As part of the
information processing office's role, three network terminals had been installed: one for System
Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California,
Berkeley and one for the Compatible Time-Sharing System project at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT). Licklider's identified need for inter-networking would be made obvious by the apparent
waste of resources this caused.
"For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with
someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the
S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. [...]
I said, it's obvious what to do (But I don't want to do it): If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one
terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet."
Robert W. Taylor, co-writer with Licklider of "The Computer as a Communications Device", in an interview with the New York Times, [2]

Although he left the IPTO in 1964, five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his vision of universal
networking that provided the impetus that led his successors such as Lawrence Roberts andRobert
Taylor to further the ARPANET development. Licklider later returned to lead the IPTO in 1973 for two
years.

[3]

[edit]Packet

switching

Main article: Packet switching

At the tip of the internetworking problem lay the issue of connecting separate physical networks to form
one logical network. During the 1960s, Paul Baran (RAND Corporation), produced a study of surviveable
networks for the US military. Information transmitted across Baran's network would be divided into what
he called 'message-blocks'. Independently, Donald Davies (National Physical Laboratory, UK), proposed
and developed a similar network based on what he called packet-switching, the term that would ultimately
be adopted. Leonard Kleinrock (MIT) developed mathematical theory behind this technology. Packetswitching provides better bandwidth utilization and response times than the traditional circuit-switching
technology used for telephony, particularly on resource-limited interconnection links.

[4]

Packet switching is a rapid store-and-forward networking design that divides messages up into arbitrary
packets, with routing decisions made per-packet. Early networks used message switched systemsthat
required rigid routing structures prone to single point of failure. This led Paul Baran's US Military funded
research to focus on using message-blocks to include network redundancy,

[5]

which in turn led to the

widespread urban legend that the Internet was designed to resist nuclear attack.
[edit]Networks

that led to the Internet

[edit]ARPANET
Main article: ARPANET

[6][7]

Len Kleinrock and the first IMP.[8]

Promoted to the head of the information processing office at DARPA, Robert Taylor intended to realize
Licklider's ideas of an interconnected networking system. Bringing in Larry Roberts from MIT, he initiated
a project to build such a network. The first ARPANET link was established between the University of
California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969. By
December 5, 1969, a 4-node network was connected by adding the University of Utah and the University
of California, Santa Barbara. Building on ideas developed inALOHAnet, the ARPANET grew rapidly. By
1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added approximately every twenty
days.

[9][10]

ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in
developing the technologies used. ARPANET development was centered around the Request for
Comments (RFC) process, still used today for proposing and distributing Internet Protocols and
Systems. RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker from the University of California,
Los Angeles, and published on April 7, 1969. These early years were documented in the 1972
film Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing.
International collaborations on ARPANET were sparse. For various political reasons, European
developers were concerned with developing theX.25 networks. Notable exceptions were the Norwegian
Seismic Array (NORSAR) in 1972, followed in 1973 by Sweden with satellite links to theTanum Earth
Station and Peter Kirstein's research group in the UK, initially at the Institute of Computer Science,
[11]

London University and later atUniversity College London.

[edit]X.25

and public access

Main articles: X.25, Bulletin board system, and FidoNet

Based on ARPA's research, packet switching network standards were developed by the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the form of X.25 and related standards. While using packet switching,
X.25 is built on the concept of virtual circuits emulating traditional telephone connections. In 1974, X.25

formed the basis for the SERCnet network between British academic and research sites, which later
became JANET. The initial ITU Standard on X.25 was approved in March 1976.

[12]

The British Post Office, Western Union International and Tymnet collaborated to create the first
international packet switched network, referred to as the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS), in
1978. This network grew from Europe and the US to cover Canada, Hong Kong and Australia by 1981.
[13]

By the 1990s it provided a worldwide networking infrastructure.

Unlike ARPANET, X.25 was commonly available for business use. Telenet offered its Telemail electronic
mail service, which was also targeted to enterprise use rather than the general email system of the
ARPANET.
The first public dial-in networks used asynchronous TTY terminal protocols to reach a concentrator
operated in the public network. Some networks, such as CompuServe, used X.25 to multiplex the
terminal sessions into their packet-switched backbones, while others, such as Tymnet, used proprietary
protocols. In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to offer electronic mail capabilities and technical
support to personal computer users. The company broke new ground again in 1980 as the first to
offer real-time chat with its CB Simulator. Other major dial-in networks were America Online(AOL)
and Prodigy that also provided communications, content, and entertainment features. Many bulletin board
system (BBS) networks also provided on-line access, such as FidoNet which was popular amongst
[citation needed]

hobbyist computer users, many of them hackers and amateur radio operators.
[edit]UUCP
Main articles: UUCP and Usenet

In 1979, two students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using
simple Bourne shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line with nearby University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Following public release of the software, the mesh of UUCP hosts forwarding on
the Usenet news rapidly expanded. UUCPnet, as it would later be named, also created gateways and
links between FidoNet and dial-up BBS hosts. UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs
involved, ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections, and the lack of
strict use policies (commercial organizations who might provide bug fixes) compared to later networks
like CSnet and Bitnet. All connects were local. By 1981 the number of UUCP hosts had grown to 550,
nearly doubling to 940 in 1984. - Sublink Network, operating since 1987 and officially founded in Italy in
1989, based its interconnectivity upon UUCP to redistribute mail and news groups messages throughout
its Italian nodes (about 100 at the time) owned both by private individuals and small companies. Sublink
Network represented possibly one of the first examples of the internet technology becoming progress
through popular diffusion.
[edit]NPL

[14]

Main articles: NPL and DCN

In 1965, Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) proposed a national data
network based on packet-switching. The proposal was not taken up nationally but by 1970 he had
designed and built a packet-switched network to meet the needs of the multidisciplinary laboratory and
prove the technology under operational conditions.

[15]

By 1976 12 computers and 75 terminal devices

were attached and more were added until the network was replaced in 1986.
[edit]Merging

the networks and creating the Internet

[edit]TCP/IP
Main article: Internet Protocol Suite

Map of the TCP/IP test network in February 1982

With so many different network methods, something was needed to unify them. Robert E.
Kahn of DARPA and ARPANET recruited Vinton Cerf of Stanford University to work with him on the
problem. By 1973, they had soon worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between
network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and instead of the network
being responsible for reliability, as in the ARPANET, the hosts became responsible. Cerf credits Hubert

Zimmerman, Gerard LeLann and Louis Pouzin (designer of the CYCLADES network) with important work
on this design.

[16]

The specification of the resulting protocol, RFC 675 - Specification of Internet Transmission Control
Program, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, Network Working Group, December, 1974,
contains the first attested use of the term internet, as a shorthand forinternetworking; later RFCs repeat
this use, so the word started out as an adjective rather than the noun it is today.
With the role of the network reduced to the bare minimum, it became possible to join almost any networks
together, no matter what their characteristics were, thereby solving Kahn's initial problem. DARPA agreed
to fund development of prototype software, and after several years of work, the first somewhat crude
demonstration of a gateway between the Packet Radio network in the SF Bay area and the ARPANET
was conducted. On November 22, 1977

[17]

a three network demonstration was conducted including the

ARPANET, the Packet Radio Network and the Atlantic Packet Satellite networkall sponsored by
DARPA. Stemming from the first specifications of TCP in 1974, TCP/IP emerged in mid-late 1978 in
nearly final form. By 1981, the associated standards were published as RFCs 791, 792 and 793 and
adopted for use. DARPA sponsored or encouraged the development of TCP/IP implementations for many
operating systems and then scheduled a migration of all hosts on all of its packet networks to TCP/IP. On
January 1, 1983, TCP/IP protocols became the only approved protocol on the ARPANET, replacing the
earlier NCP protocol.
[edit]ARPANET

[18]

to several federal wide area networks: MILNET, NSI, and

NSFNet
Main articles: ARPANET and NSFNet
After the ARPANET had been up and running for several years, ARPA looked for another agency to hand
off the network to; ARPA's primary mission was funding cutting edge research and development, not
running a communications utility. Eventually, in July 1975, the network had been turned over to
the Defense Communications Agency, also part of the Department of Defense. In 1983, the U.S.
military portion of the ARPANET was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET. MILNET
subsequently became the unclassified but military-only NIPRNET, in parallel with the SECRETlevel SIPRNET and JWICS for TOP SECRET and above. NIPRNET does have controlled security
gateways to the public Internet.
The networks based around the ARPANET were government funded and therefore restricted to
noncommercial uses such as research; unrelated commercial use was strictly forbidden. This initially
restricted connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, the connections expanded to
more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment

Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to
those who were.

BBN Technologies TCP/IP internet map early 1986

Several other branches of the U.S. government, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA),
the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE) became heavily involved in
Internet research and started development of a successor to ARPANET. In the mid 1980s, all three of
these branches developed the first Wide Area Networks based on TCP/IP. NASA developed the NASA
Science Network, NSF developed CSNET and DOE evolved the Energy Sciences Network or ESNet.
In 1984 NSF developed CSNET exclusively based on TCP/IP. CSNET connected with ARPANET using
TCP/IP, and ran TCP/IP over X.25, but it also supported departments without sophisticated network
connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. This grew into the NSFNetbackbone, established in
1986, and intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by
the NSF.

[19]

[edit]Transition

towards the Internet

[20]

The term "internet" was adopted in the first RFC published on the TCP protocol (RFC 675:

Internet

Transmission Control Program, December 1974) as an abbreviation of the term internetworking and the
two terms were used interchangeably. In general, an internet was any network using TCP/IP. It was
around the time when ARPANET was interlinked with NSFNet in the late 1980s, that the term was used
[21]

as the name of the network, Internet,

being a large and global TCP/IP network.

As interest in wide spread networking grew and new applications for it were developed, the Internet's
technologies spread throughout the rest of the world. The network-agnostic approach in TCP/IP meant
that it was easy to use any existing network infrastructure, such as the IPSS X.25 network, to carry

Internet traffic. In 1984, University College London replaced its transatlantic satellite links with TCP/IP
[22]

over IPSS.

Many sites unable to link directly to the Internet started to create simple gateways to allow transfer of email, at that time the most important application. Sites which only had intermittent connections
used UUCP or FidoNet and relied on the gateways between these networks and the Internet. Some
gateway services went beyond simple e-mail peering, such as allowing access to FTP sites via UUCP or
e-mail.
Finally, the Internet's remaining centralized routing aspects were removed. The EGP routing protocol was
replaced by a new protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), in order to allow the removal of
the NSFNet Internet backbone network. In 1994, Classless Inter-Domain Routing was introduced to
support better conservation of address space which allowed use of route aggregation to decrease the
[23]

size of routing tables.

The picture on the right hand side shows a system made with the help of the

high-tech company BBN.

[edit]TCP/IP
[edit]CERN,

becomes worldwide

the European Internet, the link to the Pacific and beyond

Between 1984 and 1988 CERN began installation and operation of TCP/IP to interconnect its major
internal computer systems, workstations, PCs and an accelerator control system. CERN continued to
operate a limited self-developed system CERNET internally and several incompatible (typically
proprietary) network protocols externally. There was considerable resistance in Europe towards more
widespread use of TCP/IP and the CERN TCP/IP intranets remained isolated from the Internet until 1989.
In 1988 Daniel Karrenberg, from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, visited Ben
Segal, CERN's TCP/IP Coordinator, looking for advice about the transition of the European side of the
UUCP Usenet network (much of which ran over X.25 links) over to TCP/IP. In 1987, Ben Segal had met
with Len Bosack from the then still small company Cisco about purchasing some TCP/IP routers for
CERN, and was able to give Karrenberg advice and forward him on to Cisco for the appropriate
hardware. This expanded the European portion of the Internet across the existing UUCP networks, and in
1989 CERN opened its first external TCP/IP connections.

[24]

This coincided with the creation of Rseaux

IP Europens (RIPE), initially a group of IP network administrators who met regularly to carry out coordination work together. Later, in 1992, RIPE was formally registered as a cooperative in Amsterdam.
At the same time as the rise of internetworking in Europe, ad hoc networking to ARPA and inbetween Australian universities formed, based on various technologies such as X.25 and UUCPNet.
These were limited in their connection to the global networks, due to the cost of making individual
international UUCP dial-up or X.25 connections. In 1989, Australian universities joined the push towards

using IP protocols to unify their networking infrastructures. AARNet was formed in 1989 by the Australian
Vice-Chancellors' Committee and provided a dedicated IP based network for Australia.
The Internet began to penetrate Asia in the late 1980s. Japan, which had built the UUCP-based
network JUNET in 1984, connected to NSFNet in 1989. It hosted the annual meeting of the Internet
Society, INET'92, in Kobe. Singapore developed TECHNET in 1990, and Thailand gained a global
Internet connection between Chulalongkorn University and UUNET in 1992.
[edit]Digital

[25]

divide

Main article: Digital divide

While developed countries with technological infrastructures were joining the Internet, developing
countries began to experience a digital divide separating them from the Internet. On an essentially
continental basis, they are building organizations for Internet resource administration and sharing
operational experience, as more and more transmission facilities go into place.
[edit]Africa
At the beginning of the 1990s, African countries relied upon X.25 IPSS and 2400 baud modem UUCP
links for international and internetwork computer communications.
In August, 1995, InfoMail Uganda, Ltd., a privately held firm in Kampala now known as InfoCom
(http://www.imul.com), and NSN Network Services of Avon, Colorado, sold in 1997 and now known as
Clear Channel Satellite, established Africa's first native TCP/IP high-speed satellite Internet services. The
data connection was originally carried by a C-Band RSCC Russian satellite which connected InfoMail's
Kampala offices directly to NSN's MAE-West point of presence using a private network from NSN's
leased ground station in New Jersey. InfoCom's first satellite connection was just 64kbps, serving a Sun
host computer and twelve US Robotics dial-up modems.
In 1996 a USAID funded project, the Leland initiative, started work on developing full Internet connectivity
for the continent. Guinea, Mozambique, Madagascar and Rwanda gained satellite earth stationsin 1997,
followed by Cte d'Ivoire and Benin in 1998.
Africa is building an Internet infrastructure. AfriNIC, headquartered in Mauritius, manages IP address
allocation for the continent. As do the other Internet regions, there is an operational forum, the Internet
Community of Operational Networking Specialists.

[26]

There are a wide range of programs both to provide high-performance transmission plant, and the
western and southern coasts have undersea optical cable. High-speed cables join North Africa and the
Horn of Africa to intercontinental cable systems. Undersea cable development is slower for East Africa;
the original joint effort between New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the East Africa
Submarine System (Eassy) has broken off and may become two efforts.

[27]

[edit]Asia and Oceania

The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), headquartered in Australia, manages IP address
allocation for the continent. APNIC sponsors an operational forum, the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet
Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT).

[28]

In 1991, the People's Republic of China saw its first TCP/IP college network, Tsinghua
University's TUNET. The PRC went on to make its first global Internet connection in 1995, between the
Beijing Electro-Spectrometer Collaboration and Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center. However,
[29]

China went on to implement its own digital divide by implementing a country-wide content filter.
[edit]Latin America
As with the other regions, the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry

(LACNIC) manages the IP address space and other resources for its area. LACNIC, headquartered in
Uruguay, operates DNS root, reverse DNS, and other key services.
[edit]Opening

the network to commerce

The interest in commercial use of the Internet became a hotly debated topic. Although commercial use
was forbidden, the exact definition of commercial use could be unclear and subjective. UUCPNet and the
X.25 IPSS had no such restrictions, which would eventually see the official barring of UUCPNet use
of ARPANET and NSFNet connections. Some UUCP links still remained connecting to these networks
however, as administrators cast a blind eye to their operation.

During the late 1980s, the first Internet service provider (ISP) companies were formed. Companies
like PSINet, UUNET, Netcom, and Portal Softwarewere formed to provide service to the regional research
networks and provide alternate network access, UUCP-based email and Usenet News to the public. The
first commercial dialup ISP in the United States was The World, opened in 1989.

[30]

In 1992, Congress allowed commercial activity on NSFNet with the Scientific and Advanced-Technology
Act, 42 U.S.C. 1862(g), permitting NSFNet to interconnect with commercial networks.

[31]

This caused

controversy amongst university users, who were outraged at the idea of noneducational use of their
networks.

[citation needed]

Eventually, it was the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low

enough that junior colleges and other schools could afford to participate in the new arenas of education
and research.

[citation needed]

By 1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies and the project
came to a close. In 1994, the NSFNet, now renamed ANSNET (Advanced Networks and Services) and
allowing non-profit corporations access, lost its standing as the backbone of the Internet. Both
government institutions and competing commercial providers created their own backbones and
interconnections. Regional network access points (NAPs) became the primary interconnections between
the many networks. The final commercial restrictions ended in May 1995 when the National Science
Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone.
[edit]Internet

[32]

Engineering Task Force

Main article: Internet Engineering Task Force

Requests for Comments (RFCs) started as memoranda addressing the various protocols that facilitate the
functioning of the Internet and were previously edited by the late Dr. Postel as part of his IANA
functions.

[33]

The IETF started in January 1985 as a quarterly meeting of U.S. government funded researchers.
Representatives from non-government vendors were invited starting with the fourth IETF meeting in
October of that year.

[citation needed]

In 1992, the Internet Society, a professional membership society, was

formed and the IETF was transferred to operation under it as an independent international standards
body.

[citation needed]

[edit]NIC,

InterNIC, IANA and ICANN

Main articles: InterNIC, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, and ICANN

The first central authority to coordinate the operation of the network was the Network Information
Centre (NIC) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. In 1972, management of
these issues was given to the newly created Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). In addition to
his role as the RFC Editor, Jon Postel worked as the manager of IANA until his death in 1998.
As the early ARPANET grew, hosts were referred to by names, and a HOSTS.TXT file would be
distributed from SRI International to each host on the network. As the network grew, this became
cumbersome. A technical solution came in the form of the Domain Name System, created by Paul
Mockapetris. The Defense Data NetworkNetwork Information Center (DDN-NIC) at SRI handled all
registration services, including the top-level domains (TLDs)
of .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .net, .com and .us, root nameserver administration and Internet number
assignments under a United States Department of Defense contract.

[34]

In 1991, the Defense Information

Systems Agency (DISA) awarded the administration and maintenance of DDN-NIC (managed by SRI up

until this point) to Government Systems, Inc., who subcontracted it to the small private-sector Network
Solutions, Inc.

[35][36]

Since at this point in history most of the growth on the Internet was coming from non-military sources, it
was decided that the Department of Defense would no longer fund registration services outside of the .mil
TLD. In 1993 the U.S. National Science Foundation, after a competitive bidding process in 1992, created
the InterNIC to manage the allocations of addresses and management of the address databases, and
awarded the contract to three organizations. Registration Services would be provided by Network
Solutions; Directory and Database Services would be provided by AT&T; and Information Services would
[37]

be provided by General Atomics.

In 1998 both IANA and InterNIC were reorganized under the control of ICANN, a California non-profit
corporation contracted by the US Department of Commerce to manage a number of Internet-related
tasks. The role of operating the DNS system was privatized and opened up to competition, while the
central management of name allocations would be awarded on a contract tender basis.
[edit]Globalization

and 21st century

Main article: Internet governance

Since the 1990s, the Internet's governance and organization has been of global importance to commerce.
The organizations which hold control of certain technical aspects of the Internet are both the successors
of the old ARPANET oversight and the current decision-makers in the day-to-day technical aspects of the
network. While formally recognized as the administrators of the network, their roles and their decisions
are subject to international scrutiny and objections which limit them. These objections have led to the
[38]

ICANN removing themselves from relationships with first the University of Southern California in 2000

and finally in September 2009, gaining autonomy from the US government by the ending of its
longstanding agreements, although some contractual obligations with theDepartment of
Commerce continue until at least 2011.

[39][40][41]

The history of the Internet will now be played out in many

ways as a consequence of the ICANN organization.

In the role of forming standard associated with the Internet, the IETF continues to serve as the ad-hoc
standards group. They continue to issue Request for Comments numbered sequentially from RFC
1 under the ARPANET project, for example, and the IETF precursor was the GADS Task Force which
was a group of US government-funded researchers in the 1980s. Many of the group's recent
developments have been of global necessity, such as the i18n working groups who develop things
like internationalized domain names. The Internet Society has helped to fund the IETF, providing limited
oversight.
[edit]Use

and culture

[edit]E-mail

and Usenet

Main articles: e-mail, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, and Usenet

E-mail is often called the killer application of the Internet. However, it actually predates the Internet and
was a crucial tool in creating it. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a timesharingmainframe computer to communicate. Although the history is unclear, among the first systems to
have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.

[42]

The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of e-mail. There is one
report

[43]

indicating experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after ARPANET's creation. In

1971 Ray Tomlinson created what was to become the standard Internet e-mail address format, using
the @ sign to separate user names from host names.

[44]

A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of time-sharing computers over
alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system. E-mail could be passed
this way between a number of networks, including ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNet, as well as to hosts
connected directly to other sites via UUCP. See the history of SMTP protocol.
In addition, UUCP allowed the publication of text files that could be read by many others. The News
software developed by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott in 1979 was used to distribute news and bulletin
board-like messages. This quickly grew into discussion groups, known as newsgroups, on a wide range
of topics. On ARPANET and NSFNet similar discussion groups would form via mailing lists, discussing
both technical issues and more culturally focused topics (such as science fiction, discussed on
the sflovers mailing list).
[edit]From

gopher to the WWW

Main articles: History of the World Wide Web and World Wide Web
As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realized the increasing need to be
able to find and organize files and information. Projects such as Gopher, WAIS, and the FTP Archive list
attempted to create ways to organize distributed data. Unfortunately, these projects fell short in being
able to accommodate all the existing data types and in being able to grow without bottlenecks.

[citation needed]

One of the most promising user interface paradigms during this period was hypertext. The technology had
[45]

been inspired by Vannevar Bush's "Memex"

and developed through Ted Nelson's research onProject

[46]

Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart's research on NLS.

Many small self-contained hypertext systems had

been created before, such as Apple Computer's HyperCard. Gopher became the first commonly-used
hypertext interface to the Internet. While Gopher menu items were examples of hypertext, they were not
commonly perceived in that way.

This NeXT Computer was used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and became the world's first Web server.

In 1989, while working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee invented a network-based implementation of the
hypertext concept. By releasing his invention to public use, he ensured the technology would become
[47]

widespread.

For his work in developing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee received the Millennium

technology prize in 2004. One early popular web browser, modeled after HyperCard, was ViolaWWW.
A potential turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction
browser

[49]

[48]

of the Mosaic web

in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing

Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen.

Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a
funding program initiated by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also
[50]

known as the Gore Bill.

Indeed, Mosaic's graphical interface soon became more popular than Gopher,

which at the time was primarily text-based, and the WWW became the preferred interface for accessing
the Internet. (Gore's reference to his role in "creating the Internet", however, was ridiculed in his
presidential election campaign. See the full article Al Gore and information technology).
Mosaic was eventually superseded in 1994 by Andreessen's Netscape Navigator, which replaced Mosaic
as the world's most popular browser. While it held this title for some time, eventually competition
from Internet Explorer and a variety of other browsers almost completely displaced it. Another important
event held on January 11, 1994, was The Superhighway Summit at UCLA's Royce Hall. This was the
"first public conference bringing together all of the major industry, government and academic leaders in
the field [and] also began the national dialogue about the Information Superhighway and its
[51]

implications."

24 Hours in Cyberspace, the "the largest one-day online event" (February 8, 1996) up to that date, took
place on the then-active website, cyber24.com.

[52][53]

[54]

It was headed by photographer Rick Smolan.

photographic exhibition was unveiled at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American
History on January 23, 1997, featuring 70 photos from the project.
[edit]Search

engines

Main article: Search engine (computing)

[55]

Even before the World Wide Web, there were search engines that attempted to organize the Internet. The
first of these was the Archie search engine from McGill University in 1990, followed in 1991 byWAIS and
Gopher. All three of those systems predated the invention of the World Wide Web but all continued to
index the Web and the rest of the Internet for several years after the Web appeared. There are still
Gopher servers as of 2006, although there are a great many more web servers. As the Web grew, search
engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the Web and allow people to find things. The
first full-text Web search engine was WebCrawler in 1994. Before WebCrawler, only Web page titles were
searched. Another early search engine, Lycos, was created in 1993 as a university project, and was the
first to achieve commercial success. During the late 1990s, both Web directories and Web search
engines were popularYahoo! (founded 1994) and Altavista (founded 1995) were the respective industry
leaders. By August 2001, the directory model had begun to give way to search engines, tracking the rise
of Google (founded 1998), which had developed new approaches to relevancy ranking. Directory
features, while still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines. Database size, which
had been a significant marketing feature through the early 2000s, was similarly displaced by emphasis on
relevancy ranking, the methods by which search engines attempt to sort the best results first. Relevancy
ranking first became a major issue circa 1996, when it became apparent that it was impractical to review
full lists of results. Consequently, algorithms for relevancy ranking have continuously improved.
Google's PageRank method for ordering the results has received the most press, but all major search
engines continually refine their ranking methodologies with a view toward improving the ordering of
results. As of 2006, search engine rankings are more important than ever, so much so that an industry
has developed ("search engine optimizers", or "SEO") to help web-developers improve their search
ranking, and an entire body of case law has developed around matters that affect search engine rankings,
such as use of trademarks in metatags. The sale of search rankings by some search engines has also
created controversy among librarians and consumer advocates.
[edit]Dot-com

[56]

bubble

Main article: Dot-com bubble

Suddenly the low price of reaching millions worldwide, and the possibility of selling to or hearing from
those people at the same moment when they were reached, promised to overturn established business
dogma in advertising, mail-order sales, customer relationship management, and many more areas. The
web was a new killer appit could bring together unrelated buyers and sellers in seamless and low-cost
ways. Visionaries around the world developed new business models, and ran to their nearest venture
capitalist. While some of the new entrepreneurs had experience in business in economics, the majority
were simply people with ideas, and didn't manage the capital influx prudently. Additionally, many dot-com
business plans were predicated on the assumption that by using the Internet, they would bypass the
distribution channels of existing businesses and therefore not have to compete with them; when the

established businesses with strong existing brands developed their own Internet presence, these hopes
were shattered, and the newcomers were left attempting to break into markets dominated by larger, more
established businesses. Many did not have the ability to do so.
The dot-com bubble burst on March 10, 2000, when the technology heavy NASDAQ Composite index
peaked at 5048.62

[57]

(intra-day peak 5132.52), more than double its value just a year before. By 2001,

the bubble's deflation was running full speed. A majority of the dot-coms had ceased trading, after having
burnt through their venture capital and IPO capital, often without ever making a profit.
[edit]Online

population forecast

A study conducted by JupiterResearch anticipates that a 38 percent increase in the number of people
with online access will mean that, by 2011, 22 percent of the Earth's population will surf the Internet
regularly. The report says 1.1 billion people have regular Web access. For the study, JupiterResearch
defined online users as people who regularly access the Internet from dedicated Internet-access devices,
which exclude cellular telephones.
[edit]Mobile

[58]

phones and the Internet

See also: Mobile Web

The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, launched in Finland
in 1996. The viability of Internet services access on mobile phones was limited until prices came down
from that model and network providers started to develop systems and services conveniently accessible
on phones. NTT DoCoMo in Japan launched the first mobile Internet service, i-Mode, in 1999 and this is
considered the birth of the mobile phone Internet services. In 2001 the mobile phone email system
by Research in Motion for their Blackberry product was launched in America. To make efficient use of the
small screen and tiny keypad and one-handed operation typical of mobile phones, a specific document
and networking model was created for mobile devices, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). Most
mobile device Internet services operate using WAP. The growth of mobile phone services was initially a
primarily Asian phenomenon with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all soon finding the majority of their
Internet users accessing resources by phone rather than by PC.

[citation needed]

Developing countries

followed, with India, South Africa, Kenya, Philippines and Pakistan all reporting that the majority of their
domestic users accessed the Internet from a mobile phone rather than a PC. The European and North
American use of the Internet was influenced by a large installed base of personal computers, and the
growth of mobile phone Internet access was more gradual, but had reached national penetration levels of
20%-30% in most Western countries.

[citation needed]

The cross-over occurred in 2008, when more Internet

access devices were mobile phones than personal computers. In many parts of the developing world, the
ratio is as much as 10 mobile phone users to one PC user.
[edit]Historiography

[59]

Some concerns have been raised over the historiography of the Internet's development. Specifically that it
is hard to find documentation of much of the Internet's development, for several reasons, including a lack
of centralized documentation for much of the early developments that led to the Internet.
"The Arpanet period is somewhat well documented because the corporation in charge - BBN - left a physical record.
Moving into the NSFNET era, it became an extraordinarily decentralized process. The record exists in people's
basements, in closets. [...] So much of what happened was done verbally and on the basis of individual trust."
Doug Gale (2007), [60]