Academic institutions, research institutes, private companies, government agencies and individuals communicate over the Internet using TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), UDP, IP (Internet Protocol) and other protocols for control and data transfer.
Purpose of the internet
In the 1950 computing was in its infancy and computers were very rare. Most of the technological inventions of the time, and also of the other times before, were linked to the military techniques and technology (cryptography, radar, communication on the battlefield). Three decades ago, RAND Corporation has looked the ways to allow U.S. government (again the military) to successfully communicate after a nuclear war. The main conclusion was that any centralized control center can be destroyed by enemy missiles. In the plan that was announced publicly in 1964 RAND Corporation has suggested that the new network has no centralized setting.
ARPA is the answer to Soviet’s launching of Sputnik in 1957 (sending the first man in the space), as well as testing of the first Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. In 1958, when NASA was formed, ARPA the main focus became computer technology and information processing. One of the goals was to connect main computers at different universities across the country.
The origin of the Internet
The first recorded social interaction through a computer network was established in 1962, and that was a set of notes by J.C.R. Licklider from MIT. He discussed about his book "Galactic Network". Licklider headed the research program at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Program Agency), the program that U.S. Department of Defense initiated. RAND and NPL also worked on the transfer of packets through the computer network and their work is being developed parallel without the knowledge of other researchers and teams.
At the end of 1969 four main computers connected ARPANET and creating of the Internet began.
Internet evolution
In the 1971 there were fifteen nodes of ARPANET, and since 1972 there were thirty-seven, and the network users could finally begin with application development. In October 1972 the first demonstration of ARPANET was published on the International Computer Communication conference. E-mail was introduced. From the beginning, e-mail messages could be written, sent and read, forwarded and replied.
In the early nineties it became possible for ordinary users to post information on the Internet sites. The first application of this type was Gopher. Using this system, people were able to view list of links. Every link has led to another set of links or documents. New big step has come in 1994 with the development of World Wide Web. Unlike Gopher, users were enabled to pass from any point in the document to the any point in the other document, known as "hypertext". World Wide Web has enabled very fast the use of photographs, audio and video.
