When was the Internet invented in the world? Who invented the Internet? History of the Internet

In our lives, it often happens that we use some useful inventions with great pleasure, but at the same time we do not have the slightest idea when and by whom they were created. The same goes for the Internet. Most of us cannot imagine our lives without the Global Network; we use it every day for work, study, entertainment, communication and just searching. necessary information. But how many people know the history of the creation of the Internet? Find out how it happened by reading the article.

War and network

It is unknown how quickly the prerequisites for the creation of the Internet could have arisen if not for the “Cold War” and the “arms race” that took place between the USA and the USSR. As one of the results of the confrontation between two influential states, a project of the American Department of Defense appeared under the name “Agency for Advanced scientific projects and Research" (Advanced Research Projects Agency), abbreviated as ARPA. This organization was tasked with developing a computer network through which secret data could be transmitted in the event of a major war. However, this reason has not been officially confirmed by anyone.

The first scientist to speak out about the possibility of creating such a network was J. Licklider from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wrote back in 1962 about a project he called the “Galactic Network”. This scientist's idea was very close to what is currently understood as the Internet. However, the concept existed only in theory so far. The most important steps lay ahead: the search for technical capabilities and algorithms for its implementation, as well as years of experimentation in an attempt to achieve a positive result. Thus began the long history of the creation of the Internet.

Natural research

The development of a unique computer connection was based on the concept of a packet network, the authors of which were English physicists Donald Davis and Roger Scantlebury. It gradually became known that in the period from 1961 to 1967, more and more specialists from the United States and Great Britain were involved in working on the project, without knowing about each other. As a result, parallel research became known at one of the scientific conferences.

It is significant that these first developments were created quite freely and spontaneously, with minimal control by the governments of both countries. And subsequently, the creator of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, noted: “We could not have done anything like this if it had been under government control from the very beginning.” By saying “we,” the computer genius also meant his predecessors who created the ARPANET network.

Significant day

The first successful connection was made in 1969. Then the ARPANET network server was located at the University of California, Los Angeles, and attempts began to establish a connection between two cities: Los Angeles and Stanford, the distance between which was 640 km. It was necessary to remotely connect to another computer on the network and send a written message, and a telephone was used to confirm the transfer. The experiment was carried out by university scientists Charlie Cline and his colleague Bill Duvall.

So, the year the Internet was created is 1969, the day is October 29, the time is 22.30. It was then that the short word log (short for login, as the password for logging into the system later became known) was completely transmitted over a network of two computers. Thus began the long history of the creation and development of the Internet, which continues to this day.

Soon after that success, already in 1971, the first program for sending email. The innovation turned out to be extremely popular and began to quickly gain popularity in the United States. In addition, in the 70s of the 20th century, the history of the creation of the Internet was marked by the emergence and development of such systems as bulletin boards, mailings to electronic mailboxes and news groups.

Computers of all networks, unite

At the same time, computer technology developers were working to create a single protocol that could unite all existing disparate networks into a single whole. The leader of this large-scale project was the American inventor Robert Kahn. It was he, together with Vinton Cerf and other colleagues, who developed TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which is still used to connect computers into a single network. For this invention, Kahn and Cerf received the unofficial title of “fathers” of the Internet.

The basic principles of the protocol they developed are as follows:

• connection occurs without internal changes in the network;
• retransmission of incomplete information;
• use of gateways and routers;
• absence common system control.

By 1983, the ARPANET network was completely transferred to the TCP/IP protocol, after which it changed its name to the one familiar to modern ears - the Internet. However, over time, this name was assigned to the newly formed NSFNet network, which turned out to be more popular and by 1990 ousted its competitor.

Also in 1983, DNS (Domain Name System) was developed - a domain name system. Thus, the history of the creation of the Internet has taken another huge step forward.

The web is being woven

And yet it was far from the Internet we know today. Yes, there was already e-mail, mailing programs, message boards, and even (in 1988) the first chat room, allowing network users to communicate in real time. However, there was no what we now call the World Wide Web - an inexhaustible source of information consisting of many web pages connected by hyperlinks. All this was developed and launched only in 1989, primarily thanks to the work of a famous scientist from the UK. It was Tim Berners-Lee who developed the HTTP protocol, the hypertext markup language HTML, URLs for websites - in a word, everything without which it is impossible to imagine the functioning of the Internet at the present stage.

If we draw an analogy with other great inventions, we can say that theorists and experimenters with the ARPANET discovered electricity, and the creator of the Internet, Berners-Lee and his colleagues, developed the first electrical appliances.

Websites and browsers

But the development process did not end there, but only continued at an accelerated pace. 1991 is the year the first Internet site was created, located at info.cern.ch. The World Wide Web became universally accessible, beginning to fulfill Berners-Lee's cherished dream that every person on the planet could take advantage of the power of the Internet. Gradually, more and more web servers and sites began to appear, based on software, created by a British computer genius.

Since 1993, the first browsers began to appear (Mosaic, Internet Explorer and others), all more people all over the world connected to the Internet, and the number of sites increased to hundreds of thousands.

Internet in the USSR and Russia

The first communication channel with the World Wide Web was laid in 1982, being used exclusively for scientific purposes - to access the archives of the main European libraries. It was only in 1989 that expansion began so that ordinary citizens could gain access. A year later, the first Relcom network appeared, and the su domain for websites of the Soviet Union was registered. News and other information began to be disseminated through the network, as well as communication between participants, including those separated by an ocean.

World Wide Web today

By 1997, the history of the creation of the Internet was almost completed, and the global network became approximately the same as we know it today. But the difference is that back then there were only 10 million computers connected to the Internet, but now the figure has reached 1.2 billion.

No previous means of communication has achieved such stunning results in such a short time.

The current trend in the development of the Internet is its distribution in developing countries of the world, as well as access through a variety of devices: communication satellites, radio channels, cable TV, telephone and cellular communication, electrical wires and leased lines.

The Internet (from the English Internet) is a worldwide system of voluntarily united computer networks, built on the use of the IP protocol and routing of data packets. The Internet forms a global information space and serves physical basis for the World Wide Web and many data transmission systems (protocols). Often referred to as the World Wide Web and the Global Network.

History of appearance.

After the Soviet Union launched the artificial Earth satellite in 1957, the US Department of Defense decided that in case of war, America needed a reliable information transmission system. Advanced agency research projects The USA (ARPA) proposed to develop a computer network for this, which was called ARPANET (English). AdvancedResearchProjectsAgencyNetwork), and in 1969, within the framework of the project, the network united four scientific institutions. Then the ARPANET network began to actively grow and develop, scientists from different fields of science began to use it.

First ARPANET server was installed on September 1, 1969 at UCLA.

By 1971, the first program for sending email over the network was developed, and the program immediately became very popular.

In 1973, the first foreign organizations from Great Britain and Norway were connected to the network via a transatlantic telephone cable, and the network became international.

In the 1970s, the network was primarily used for sending email, and the first mailing lists, news groups, and bulletin boards emerged. However, at that time the network could not yet easily interact with other networks built on other technical standards.

By the end of the 1970s, data transfer protocols began to develop rapidly, which were standardized in 1982-83.

On January 1, 1983, the ARPANET switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP, which is still successfully used to connect (or, as they also say, “layer”) networks. It was in 1983 that the term “Internet” was assigned to the ARPANET network.

In 1984, the Domain Name System (DNS) was developed.

In 1984, the ARPANET network had a serious rival, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) founded an extensive inter-university network NSFNet (abbreviated from the English National Science Foundation Network), which was made up of smaller networks (including the then famous Usenet and Bitnet networks) and had much greater bandwidth than ARPANET. Over the course of a year, about 10 thousand computers connected to this network, and the title “Internet” began to smoothly pass to NSFNet.

In 1988, the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol was invented, making real-time communication possible on the Internet.

In 1989 in Europe, within the walls of the European Council for Nuclear Research (French Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, CERN), the concept of the World Wide Web was born. It was proposed by the famous British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who, within two years, developed the HTTP protocol, the HTML language and URIs.

In 1990, the ARPANET network ceased to exist, completely losing competition to NSFNet. In the same year, the first connection to the Internet via a telephone line was recorded.

In 1991, the World Wide Web became available to the public on the Internet, and in 1993, the famous NCSA Mosaic web browser appeared. The World Wide Web was gaining popularity.

The Internet has become so integral to the life of modern man that sometimes it is even difficult to imagine that it could not exist. It's even harder to imagine how we could get along without the Internet nowadays. Indeed, thanks to this invention, any boundaries and distances practically ceased to exist. On the Internet, everything is at arm's length. This is truly a worldwide phenomenon. Few people think about it or attach importance to it, but the history of the creation and development of this means of communication is quite interesting. But who invented the Internet? What sequence of events led to its appearance that gave rise to such an incredible increase in popularity?

At the very beginning

If you try to look at the very origins, the history of the Internet goes back to the very first computer networks, which appeared in 1956. Naturally, almost every invention is preceded by a certain need. Already then there was a need for unification computer technology in order to provide simplified data exchange and increase productivity.

In 1957, the US Department of Defense decided to begin developing reliable information transmission and communication systems in case any danger from the outside arose. DARPA (the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) proposed using computer networks in this capacity. All this became a big start for the entire information sphere. Of course, the Internet in the form in which we know it will appear much later.

The prototype of the Internet - ARPANET

It cannot be said that the creation of the Internet occurred overnight; rather, it was created in stages. The design and development of the network was entrusted to the four largest scientific institutions. These are the Universities of California at Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, the University of Utah and the Stanford Research Center. In 1969, they were united into a network called ARPANET.

The development was funded by the US Department of Defense. Subsequently, other research centers and scientific institutions joined the network. Many expressed a desire to take part in the work to build and improve the technology. The installation of the first server took place on September 2, 1969. A computer called Honeywell DP-516 had an insignificant, by today's standards, amount of RAM - 24 kilobytes.

By the way, there is another person who can be considered the forefather of the Network. This is Joseph Licklider. He was one of the first active promoters of the creation of global networks. If you ask the question of who invented the Internet, then part of the credit definitely belongs to him. He published his ideas, which are very close in meaning to the Internet that we see now, back in 1960 in the article “Human-Computer Symbiosis.”

Birthday

We have come to the main question. Namely, in what year was the Internet invented? So, on October 29, 1969, a significant event occurred. Charlie Cline, who was in Los Angeles, was attempting to establish a remote connection to a computer at Stanford, located 640 kilometers away. There, the reception of transmitted symbols was controlled by Bill Duvall, confirming successes by telephone. It was planned to send the LOGIN login command, but on the first attempt only two characters were sent - LO, after which the Network went down. Operations were resumed quickly, and the transfer was successfully completed around 10:30 p.m. We can say that the Internet actually began from this date.

Further development

When the performance was tested experimentally new technology, systematic development of related software began. 1971 is the year the first email client was born. Of course, it was far from the software that is available now, but it quickly gained popularity.

Already in 1973, the Network began to acquire an international image, as organizations from another continent, namely Europe, were joined. The first countries were Great Britain and Norway. The connection was made via the transatlantic telephone trunk.

In general, in the 1970s, the main services that were available and used on the Internet were e-mail, news, and message boards. Even then, even mailing lists appeared, although there was no spam then, everything was just to the point. Spam appeared a little later.

Network Engineering

To make using the Internet as simple and intuitive as it is now, there was still a lot of work to be done. In particular, at that time there was no interaction with other computer networks that were built according to other standards. The creators, engineers and programmers were faced with a difficult and interesting task: it was necessary to develop a protocol that would standardize and make it possible working together diverse networks.

Jon Postel played a huge role in resolving this issue. It was he who came up with the concept of the TCP/IP protocol (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which replaced the previously used NCP. It is with the help of TCP/IP that networks are combined (or merged, superimposed). The Protocol was adopted in 1983 (later, however, it was repeatedly amended and improved). So among the names of those who invented the Internet or made a significant contribution to it, his name can definitely stand.

At the same time, the ARPANET increasingly began to be called the “Internet.” By the way, this name itself is an abbreviation for INTERconnected NETworks, which means “united networks”.

And in 1984, we completed development and implemented a domain name system. Scientific name - Domain Name Server, DNS. Thanks to this, you now write website addresses in letters. If there were no DNS, you would have to write sets of numbers - IP addresses.

Well-known chats - real-time communication - work using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) technology, which was created in 1988.

Another predecessor

In fact, the history of the Internet is very rich in many people, factors, backgrounds and coincidences. You could easily write a whole book. But we will focus on the most basic events. In 1984, the US National Science Foundation launched a large inter-university network - NFCnet, which became a serious competitor to ARPANET. It united several small networks, had greater bandwidth, and in the first year about 10,000 computers connected to it.

The key point was that NFCnet used the principle of “backbone networks”, which ensures high stability, speed and reliability. This feature was a major breakthrough, outlining the contours of the technologies that exist today.

However, core networks did not become the final stage of development. In 1993, they were replaced by even more advanced NAPs or, more simply put, access points. This opened up the possibility of interaction between commercial networks, which further significantly expanded the boundaries of the use of the Internet.

The technical background is, perhaps, a symbiosis of ARPANET and NFCnet.

World Wide Web, or the well-known WWW

Few people know, but the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN, the same one that scared us with the launch of the Large Hadron Collider) played a big role in making the Internet so popular among ordinary users. Or rather, a scientist from Great Britain, Tim Berners-Lee, who worked there. It was he who came up with the concept that later became the World Wide Web.

Over the course of two years, he developed HTTP, a system of URI identifiers, and HTML. The latter is a programming language using hypertext markup. To make it clearer how huge this contribution is, it is worth saying that almost all sites are written in HTML (all other options appeared much later). HTTP technology allows users to access the vast majority of Internet resources, and URLs (a subtype of URI) are the names that we see in the address bar of a web browser.

So, what we constantly use when browsing websites is the Web. And the Internet is a network through which information and servers are accessed. Nowadays, the Internet is identified directly with the Web, although they are not the same thing.

Some more facts

In 1990, the maintenance and operation of the ARPANET network was discontinued due to no longer being needed. We can say that the final transition to the Internet has taken place. At the same time, the first connection to the network was made using a telephone line.

The World Wide Web became publicly available in 1991. And the very first web browser, called NCSA Mosaic, was developed by Marc Anderssen in 1993. Perhaps it was Mosaic, together with HTTP, that ensured such a rapid spread of the Internet and its incredible popularity. The first - thanks to a clear and thoughtful user interface, and the second - because it provided all the necessary communications and made it possible to develop content. Now it was truly the Internet information network.

Later, data exchange began to be handled by providers, instead of university and other supercomputers. The World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, was organized. And already in 1995, WWW overtook all other protocols in terms of the volume of information transmitted.

Rapid growth

In the 90s, the Internet united almost all disparate networks and grew significantly in all respects. These are hardware and software, the number of sites and other information, access speed and stability. But the main growth is the number of users. Over the 5 years of its existence, the audience has already reached more than 50 million users. By comparison, it took television 13 years to reach the same numbers. Today, more than two billion people are connected to the network, and this figure is growing steadily.

Many different services have appeared, such as streaming video, cloud data storage, social media, forums, blogs and much more. Data transfer occurs on high speeds and in gigantic volumes. Hundreds of petabytes of information flow through the network every day. In general, it is now difficult to imagine the life of a modern person without the World Wide Web. Currently, access can be obtained via satellite, mobile communications, cable and fiber optic highways, from almost anywhere on Earth. The Internet has become an integral part of our existence.

Conclusion

There are too many key people in the history of the creation and development of global networks to make it possible to unambiguously answer the question of who invented the Internet. This did not happen overnight, but many talented specialists worked on it.

The advent of the Internet was not a whim or an experiment; it was due to many factors that made it simply inevitable. We can only give credit to all the above-mentioned people for the fact that we have at our disposal such an irreplaceable thing as the Internet.

There are many opinions about who exactly invented the Internet. Even several people are called “parents” of the World Wide Web. Well-known media figure Gordon Crovitz 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 is that the Internet was created by order of the US government for military purposes, but this legend has little to do with the truth, Crovitz wrote.

The creation of the Internet by the US government is just one of the urban legends. “The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet because it needed to maintain communications even in the event of a nuclear attack,” writes Crovitz.

According to the official version, in the 50s of the last century, in conditions cold war The US Department of Defense thought about the need to create a reliable, trouble-free information transmission system. As one of the options, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now DARPA) proposed developing a computer network. The project was entrusted to four organizations: the universities of California, Santa Barbara, Utah and Stanford research center. They created the ARPAnet. The work began in 1957, and only 12 years later - in 1969 - the network connected the computers of the listed universities.

However, the idea of ​​the Internet itself arose earlier, Crovitz recalls. During World War II, US President Theodore Roosevelt's scientific advisor, Vannevar Bush, was part of a group of scientists involved in the Manhattan Project [the code name for the US nuclear weapons program]. Later, in 1946, he wrote an article “How We Can Think,” in which he proposed a prototype of a device that could “expand human memory” - Memex. This device was imagined as a kind of “repository” for all human knowledge that can be formally described, and capable of quickly finding and issuing necessary information. Many technology enthusiasts see Memex's description as a prediction of the Internet.

Of course, at that time this was perceived by many as a figment 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 Crovitz writes, the federal government's involvement in this project was modest - through the ARPA agency. But the purpose of the project was not to maintain communications during a nuclear attack, and, in fact, ARPAnet was not pro-Internet, if you understand the Internet as the connection of two or more computer networks, Robert Taylor, who led the 60 s project at ARPA.

“But if the Internet was not invented by the government, then by whom?” - Gordon Crovitz 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 credit goes to the company where Robert Taylor moved after working at ARPA - Xerox. It was in the Xerox PARC laboratory, located in Silicon Valley, that it was developed in 1970 Ethernet technology, designed to transfer data between different computer networks. As is known today, in the same laboratory it was developed personal computer Xerox Alto and graphical user interface.

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 at the laboratory realized that the government was too busy with other matters to care about connecting various computer networks into a single Network. Therefore, they had to deal with this issue themselves. At the same time, Xerox PARC employees blamed ARPA, which, while 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 linked Ethernet and ARPAnet through PUP (PARC Universal Protocol).”

So, the Internet was created at Xerox PARC. “But then why didn’t Xerox become the world’s largest company?” - 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.

Xerox executives 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 several computers to share a copier.

Many people know the story of how in 1979 the founder Apple Steve Jobs came to Xerox PARC for ideas - he entered into an agreement with Xerox management under which he could gain access to any innovative developments of the laboratory. “They just didn’t know what they were,” Jobs later said, who helped make Apple a great company thanks in part to developments he learned from Xerox.

However, the sale of copiers brought profit to Xerox for decades. The company's name even became synonymous with the copier. But Xerox missed the boat, and in the era of the digital revolution, company managers can only console themselves with the thought that only a few manage to successfully move from one technological era to another.

In 1995, the development of the Internet came completely under the control of commercial companies. The part of the network controlled by the supercomputers of the US National Science Foundation was left with only its own narrow niche. Since 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 Crovitz, once again proves the greater role of business than government.

To build a successful technology business, both factors must be present: a disruptive technology and special skills to bring it to market. The contrast between Apple and Xerox shows that few business leaders can succeed in the face of such a daunting task. It is they, and not the government, who bear the main credit.

The Internet can be compared to the global information space, it's like a unified system of computer networks. An incredible number of computers all over the world are connected to the Internet. And who was able to create such a basis for a certain “information society”? Who invented the Internet?

Who invented the Internet

It all started with the Soviet Union launching an artificial Earth satellite in 1957. As a result, America decided to protect itself in case of war and find a reliable information transmission system. There was a proposal to develop a computer network. Its development was immediately entrusted to the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Utah, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Stanford Research Center. That's who invented the Internet, it turns out. The created computer network was called ARPANET. This abbreviation in English means Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. And already in 1969, these 4 scientific institutions united in a network. Funding for the project came from the US Department of Defense. The first communication session was carried out between the University of California Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute, which were located 640 km from each other. The first attempt was not completely successful, but after the connection was restored on the same day, the second attempt was successful! If you are ever asked in what year the Internet was invented. You can safely name his date of birth: October 29, 1969. The time of the first attempt was at 21:00, and the second at 22:30.

Development computer network ARPANET was already spreading to scientists in various fields of science. And in 1971, the first program for transmitting email over the network was created. The popularity of such a program immediately increased. In 1973, ARPANET became international. 1983 was a significant year. The ARPANET transitioned from NCP to TCP/IP. This protocol is still used to connect networks. And it was in 1983 that the Internet was invented as the name of the ARPANT network. Domain names came into use in 1984. Communicating in real time on the Internet in the form of a chat became possible in 1988, when the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol was invented.

It was only in 1989 that the idea of ​​creating the World Wide Web appeared in Europe. We should be grateful to the scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who later created the HTTP protocol, developed the HTML language and URIs. Researcher Robert Kaillialu worked with this scientist, the World Wide Web project was in development. The Internet became publicly accessible in 1991. The famous NCSA Mosaic browser appeared in 1993. Open technical standards The Internet made it independent of commercial companies and businesses. In 1997, there were about 10 million computers connected to the Internet. The exchange of information via the Internet has become very popular.

Did those who invented the Internet think that by now it would be possible to connect to the network via communication satellites? cell phones, TVs, radio channels, electrical wires. Now many people simply cannot imagine life without the Internet. On at the moment You can hear the term Runet, which is the Russian-language part of the World Wide Web. That is, there are national domains su, ru and рф. Modern Russian networks started by programmers and physicists in 1990. The first Russian domain ru was registered on April 7, 1994. The Cyrillic alphabet, namely the RF domain, first appeared quite recently on May 12, 2010. To date, there are many browsers, that is, web programs with which we access the Internet. Today's network, of course, cannot be compared with what came before, but many of us are grateful to those who invented the Internet.