1. Launch of the Satellite
You won’t believe it, but the creation of the Internet is directly tied to the first space satellite launched by the USSR in 1957. And no, this isn’t some conspiracy theory, it's the official version of how the Internet came to be. Here’s how it went down…
In 1957, the Soviet Union beat the USA by launching the first satellite 🛰️🚩, which was a major blow to America’s national pride ☹️. In response, Congress declared that something like this should never happen again, and in 1958, the organization DARPA was established.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA — is the United States Department of Defense's research arm. This organization was funded by the US Department of Defense but didn’t conduct the research itself; instead, it provided grants for projects it found interesting.
DARPA was tasked with ensuring US military technologies stayed cutting-edge. DARPA operates independently from standard military research institutions and reports directly to the Department of Defense leadership.
DARPA employs only about 200 people, but its budget is several tens of billions of dollars 💰💰. The organization funds hundreds of research projects that could potentially be useful to the US Department of Defense.
DARPA was responsible for funding universities to develop the distributed computer network ARPANET 🌐💻 (which later became the Internet), as well as Unix-BSD 🖥️ (the Berkeley UNIX system) and the TCP/IP protocol suite. Today, the organization also sponsors projects like self-driving cars (Tesla) 🚘, military-grade space communication (StarLink) 🛰️, and reusable rockets (SpaceX) 🚀.
2. ARPANET
At the height of the Cold War, the United States wanted a communication network that could survive even a nuclear war ☢️💥(yep, that's what the Internet was created for, what did you think?). The telephone networks back then weren’t reliable or resilient enough. If critical nodes were lost, the telephone network would break into independent fragments.
To address this problem, ARPA created a special department called the Information Processing Techniques Office. The development of the network itself was handed over to a group of four universities:
- University of California, Los Angeles;
- Stanford Research Institute;
- University of Utah;
- University of California, Santa Barbara.
Research began in 1969. The equipment at the time was super primitive, so sending data required combining loads of different elements: hardware, services, programs—you name it... They needed to standardize how all these worked together.
Also, the military wanted the system to natively support the most advanced data transfer protocols of that time: telnet and ftp.
The universities participating in its development were chosen as the first ARPANET network nodes. Later, other technological institutions joined, and eventually, the military got involved as well.
Within six months, the first working prototype was developed. The first tests of this technology took place on October 29, 1969, at 9:00 PM. The network consisted of two terminals that were as far apart as possible to test the system under extreme conditions.
One terminal was at the University of California, and the other, 600 km away, was at Stanford University. These terminals used 16-bit mini-computers Honeywell DDP-316 with 12 KB of RAM. Digital subscriber lines DS-0 with a capacity of 56 Kbps were leased from AT&T.
The experiment was to send the word login over the network. It didn’t work on the first attempt; something went wrong. But after several hours, they tried again, and it was a success: the receiver saw the word login on their screen.
After the experiment's success, the network began expanding in both quantity and quality. More universities started connecting. Software improved, and hardware got standardized. But the main users of the network were still scientists.
In 1973, European universities began connecting to the network—making it truly international 🌍. By 1977, the network had a whopping 111 computers (servers). By 1983, with 4,000 computers placed all over the US, satellite connections were established with Hawaii and Europe.
3. Internet's Birthday 🎂
With very few exceptions, early computers were directly connected to terminals and used by individual users, usually in the same building or room. These were known as Local Area Networks (LAN). Networks that extended beyond local areas, known as Wide Area Networks (WAN), started appearing in the 1950s and became operational in the 1960s.
Often, local networks were designed by technical university and lab staff for their internal needs. They had their own (often analog) data transfer protocols that were typically not compatible with one another.
However, in 1972, a group of developers led by Vinton Cerf created a protocol stack called TCP/IP. 💻 It turned out to be universal, suitable for both global networks and numerous local ones.
In July 1976, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn demonstrated data transmission using TCP over three different networks. The data packet traveled the route: San Francisco — London — University of Southern California. By the end of its journey, the packet had traveled 150,000 km without losing a single bit.
In 1978, Vinton Cerf, Jon Postel, and Danny Cohen decided to split the then-current TCP protocol into two separate functions: TCP (Transmission Control Protocol, for managing transmission) and IP (Internet Protocol, for inter-network communication).
TCP handled breaking a message into small packets, datagrams, and reassembling them at the destination. IP took care of transmitting these individual datagrams while ensuring they were received.
And that’s how the modern Internet protocol was born. On January 1, 1983, ARPANET officially switched to the new protocol. This day is considered the official birthday of the Internet 🍾.
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