In less than 20 years of the existence of the Internet - the World Wide Web, more than 966 million sites have appeared (data for 2021). All five continents are connected to the Internet. Users from America and Europe exchange information in real time with Australians and South Africans.
To show the global reach of the free information web, just look at the statistics of the distribution of sites by continent.
How and when the Internet appeared, what technologies made this miracle of the twentieth century possible, who and when created the WWW - in this article.
History of the creation of technologies for the Internet
The history of the World Wide Web took shape entirely in the second half of the 20th century. This is explained by the relative novelty of the underlying technologies. The first networks connected computers long before the widespread introduction of personal computers into our lives, in 1956.
According to a number of researchers, the creation of a LAN was preceded by a pragmatic idea to control a computer at a distance. The computers were large and got very hot. The halls where they worked had to be cooled, and the presence of people in them was undesirable. Remote control made it possible to place specialists in another office.
LANs of this time rarely went beyond the building and were local in nature. Nevertheless, they were chosen by the United States military department as an alternative and promising means of reliable communication in case of emergency situations and military invasion.
Creation of distributed networks, ARPANET
In 1957, American intelligence learned of Soviet missiles installed in Cuba, which turned nuclear war from hypothetical to very real. The military's arguments in favor of creating computer networks:
- During a nuclear war, long-wave communications will become impossible to use for long-distance communications.
- Any centralized communication systems can be disabled by damage to the central nodes.
- Distributed decentralized networks work even if individual segments are destroyed.
Already in 1957, the task set and financed by the military was taken up by employees of DARPA, an American agency in whose hands promising developments of a defense nature were concentrated. The project was complex, so four leading higher education institutions in the country were involved in it. These are two California universities: Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, Utah and Stanford.
The figure shows a hand-drawn diagram of the ARPANET, which identifies these nodes, and the names of the computers are indicated on the rectangular callouts.
At the end of the 60s, the network finally moved from the design stage to real operation. The first ARPANET server, the project's working title, was launched in September 1969. It was the Honeywell DP-516 computer. To estimate its power, it is enough to indicate the amount of RAM, which is 24 kilobytes. But by the standards of that time this was enough.
Global connectivity
Of course, scientific schools saw benefits for themselves in the development of a unified network. The new invention opens up the possibility of ensuring communication between research teams and individual scientists. More and more new participants joined the project, funded by the US Department of Defense.
The team was relatively small, less than 150 people. Half of ARPA's staff held the title of Ph.D. They are the ones who take the global approach to development.
Thus, a number of Internet historians believe that we owe the emergence of the concept of globality to the author of the Galactic Network article, J. Licklider. This work examines the prerequisites for the creation of galactic networks covering millions of people. Licklider became director of the research program on October 4, 1962. Without this researcher, ARPANET could have remained a closed phenomenon to the world, and the Internet would have appeared much later.
Packages and protocols
Technology and communication protocol became a key issue in the ARPA project. At this stage, the involvement of specialist Leonard Kleinorok was required. His publication, dated 1961, examined in detail communication protocols based on packet transmission technology.
Since the line bandwidth is limited, it is difficult to transfer the entire file. Initially, telephone cables were used, laid throughout the country. Any interference or interruptions led to the need to retransmit the data. Kleinork suggested splitting the file into small packages.
The sender sends them one by one, and the recipient carefully places them on the drive and then collects the entire file. The theory was proven by a practical communication session between Massachusetts and California. The data traveled through low-speed telephone lines about 5,000 km long.
Perhaps this was the first global information network, since these cities are located in different time zones. Researchers have proven that time difference does not matter for communication. But the speed and reliability provided by telephone wires were considered unsatisfactory. To ensure reliable and high-speed exchange of information, it was necessary to create separate lines.
Open network and the name Internet
Most researchers of the history of the World Wide Web believe that its modern name “Internet” originates from the French project Cyclades (Cyclade). Work on its launch took place in the 1970s of the last century. The developers of the Cyclade prioritized connection with other similar networks, Inter-net.
The figure shows the original design of the Cyclades, which united five French cities. Lines with a bandwidth of 48 kb are highlighted in bold, and lines with a bandwidth of 4-8 kb are highlighted in thin lines. Used 8 different operating systems interacting with each other.
The French did not have such powerful funding as the ARPA group, so instead of one expensive system they decided to build a global one from local segments interacting with each other. This model suited the military, commercial structures, educational institutions and individuals. Access to the Cyclada could be obtained easier and cheaper.
French engineers have significantly improved the protocol to enable fast data transfer using connected computers as transmitters. This made it possible to increase throughput and information security. In the new protocol, the file was not opened on intermediate computers, but was only sent further unchanged. The transmission problem was solved in hardware.
The key engineering decision was the approval of a communication standard between open information systems. It was developed by ISO, the international standardization agency. This document defined the principles and levels of interaction.
Unified standards made it possible to eliminate routers and powerful central servers. Data could now be sent directly from user to user. In addition, levels of interaction were determined to ensure the safety of use of the network for departments, including the military.
Who is Tim Berners-Lee?
Photo: TASS / Steve Parsons
Before continuing the story about the development of the global network, it is worth mentioning the biography of the creator of the Internet (in the form in which we are accustomed to seeing it). Tim's talent did not fall from heaven; both of his parents were mathematicians and worked on the creation of one of the first Mark I computers. Therefore, we can say that the future creator of the modern Internet grew up surrounded by computers and information systems from childhood.
Berners-Lee built his first computer while still studying at King's College, Oxford. There, he and a friend were caught carrying out a hacker attack, for which they were deprived of the opportunity to use university computers. One way or another, he graduated from the university with honors, received a specialty in Physics and went to work at , where he worked on distributed transaction systems. A little later, Tim moved to DG Nash Ltd. There he worked on programs for printers and the creation of similar multitasking operating systems.
Perhaps Berners-Lee would never have shown his talent if he had not ended up at the CERN nuclear research laboratory. There he was a software consultant, simultaneously creating the Enquire document management system, on the basis of which the global hypertext project - the World Wide Web - was formed. It was the creation of WWW that gave a big impetus to the development of the Internet.
How did the Internet appear?
The concept of the Internet was first used in the 1970s. This name was coined for the TCP/IP protocol, a single standard for packet file exchange that all operating systems must understand. A kind of international language for computers to communicate.
Strictly speaking, the TCP protocol itself was invented back in the 1970s. In 1978, the developers decided to divide its description into two areas based on functionality. The function of TCP is to parse file packets at the origin and then reassemble them at the destination. IP controlled the transmission.
The standard turned out to be so successful that the ARPANET developers switched their brainchild to TCP/IP. This event occurred on January 1, 1983. Another alternative internet birthday.
The IP address required to access the server with web pages was not very convenient for users. Therefore, in 1984, the concept of domains was introduced. They were indicated in a format familiar to the modern user with .com and other country-specific combinations. It is from the domain that the concept of dotcom is derived - dot (dot) and com (com).
In 1988, it was possible to overcome the limitation of information transfer in deferred mode. Previously, the file could only be sent by email. Now read the document in real time.
In the history of the emergence of the Internet, 1989 can be considered key. Scientists from the UK have proposed turning the network between countries into a worldwide one. To achieve this, standards were unified, called HTTP and URL for specifying the name of a page or file. HTML was also proposed - a language for describing text with hyperlinks, which was expanded many times in subsequent years.
Since 1990, anyone could connect to the World Wide Web through a telephone line using a modem. Another thing is that this access was paid and not everyone could afford it.
The birthday of the Internet can also be considered May 17, 1991, when the standard for website pages was adopted.
What was the Internet like before the Web era?
Usenet interface.
Before the creation and development of the Internet, the computer network Usenet was popular.
It was also used for communication and file transfer. But the principle was different: the difference was that Usenet consisted not of pages, but of news groups and worked using the NTTP protocol.
By the way, this network became the foundation for the development of the web. It was here that the first online communities appeared. Its users introduced the concepts of “nickname”, “smile”, “flood”, “trolling” and other terms without which we cannot imagine the Internet community.
Inventors of the Internet
While American researchers made Internet hardware possible, European researchers did more work on hypertext and HTTP standards. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee laid the foundations of the Internet when he invented URL, HTTP and a number of other Internet standards.
He also developed the concept of WWW - a global web consisting of a huge number of interconnected documents, the transition between which is possible with one click on a hyperlink.
Also among the people who came up with and essentially invented the Internet, researchers include Berners-Lee’s colleague, the Belgian scientist Robert Caillot. He also worked at CERN on a data processing project.
The initial task was to systematize the knowledge accumulated by CERN, a leading European research center. But the idea, conceived and implemented by Tim Berners-Lee, was easily scalable to any number of documents and arbitrary types of information.
Without the inventions of European scientists that make it possible to organize access, communication between data from different sites and, most importantly, quickly edit information on them, global networks would not have received such widespread use. Only specialists could use them.
What the first browser looked like
The creation of the WWW service and browsers that can display Web pages on a PC has led to a real boom in the global network. A browser with a graphical interface appeared in 1993. It was the first browser of its kind and it was called NCSA Mosaic.
All these discoveries and inventions, especially the WWW, have created the conditions for mass users to connect to the Internet. Nowadays, everyone can travel the vastness of the World Wide Web. The number of people using the Internet is increasing exponentially.
When the Internet appeared, in what year, you now know. For those people who do not like to read, but like to watch videos, I recorded a video on this topic. I wish you success!
Internet birthday
Some researchers believe that the history of the World Wide Web should be counted from the date October 26, 1969. On this day, an event took place, the true value of which only specialists could appreciate. And this was done by ordinary students Charlie Cline and Bill Duvall. In the photo they were taken on the 40th anniversary of the event.
A remote connection was established between Stanford and Los Angeles. With the modern development of technology, 640 kilometers separating the cities is a small distance. But for that time it was a breakthrough that proved the possibility of reaching a global level of coverage of communications between people.
To be fair, it is worth noting that the transfer was completed only by 40%. The first two letters of the word LOGIN planned for broadcast were transmitted. The instability of the connection affected. Charlie Cline and Bill Duvall tried again later that day. LOGIN was finally transmitted at 10:30 p.m. Note that the computers being connected were part of the ARPANET.
The next three years were devoted to intensive development of software for the network and improvement of transmission technology. So, in 1971, an email client was launched, which became the prototype of modern email. A notice board and news publication were developed.
The next stage of development is the transmission of a digital signal across the ocean. In 1973, using telephone cables laid along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, researchers from the United States communicated over the network with Great Britain and Norway.
The Internet's birthday can equally be considered September 30, 1993. On this day, CERN lawyers settled all the formalities and allowed access to the World Wide Web to a wide mass of users who were not able to enter the research laboratory’s network. And already in 1994, WWW appeared in schools and other educational institutions.
Thus, the CERN research team created the Internet - the world's public library of knowledge. Therefore, September 30, 1993 has more right to the title of the Internet’s birthday than the events in 1969. The question “How old is the Internet?”, as the library of all knowledge in the world, most likely should be answered, counting from this later date.
"15-hour workdays, every day"
In the fall of 1969, Charlie Cline was a graduate student trying to earn an engineering degree. His group was transferred to the ARPANET project after Kleinrock received government funding to develop the network. In August, Kline and others were actively working on preparing software for the Sigma 7 mainframe to interface with IMP. Since there was no standard communication interface between computers and IMPs—Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs would not invent Ethernet until 1973—the team created a 5-meter cable from scratch to communicate between the computers. Now they only needed another computer to exchange information.
Charlie Cline
The second research center to receive an IMP was SRI (this happened in early October). For Bill Duvall, the event marked the start of preparations for the first data transfer from UCLA to SRI, on their SDS 940. Teams at both institutions, he said, were working hard to achieve the first successful data transfer by October 21.
“I went into the project, developed and implemented the required software, and it was the kind of process that sometimes happens in software development - 15-hour days, every day, until you're done,” he recalls.
As Halloween approaches, the pace of development at both institutions accelerates. And the teams were ready even before the deadline.
“Now we had two nodes, we leased the line from AT&T, and we were expecting amazing speeds of 50,000 bits per second,” Kleinrock says. “And we were ready to do it, to log in.”
“We scheduled the first test for October 29,” adds Duval. – At that time it was pre-alpha. And we thought, okay, we have three test days to get it all up and running.”
On the evening of the 29th, Kline worked late - as did Duvall at SRI. They planned to try to transmit the first message over the ARPANET in the evening, so as not to ruin anyone's work if the computer suddenly “crash”. In room 3420, Cline sat alone in front of an ITT Teletype terminal connected to a computer.
And here's what happened that evening - including one of the historic computer failures in computing history - in the words of Kline and Duvall themselves:
Kline: I logged into Sigma 7 OS and then ran a program I had written that allowed me to command a test packet to be sent to SRI. Meanwhile, Bill Duvall at SRI started a program that accepted incoming connections. And we talked on the phone at the same time.
We had a few problems at first. We had a problem with code translation because our system used EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Information Interchange Code), a standard used by IBM and Sigma 7. But the computer at SRI used ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which then became the standard for ARPANET, and then the whole world.
Having dealt with several of these problems, we tried to log in. And to do this you had to type the word “login”. The system at SRI was programmed to intelligently recognize available commands. In advanced mode, when you first typed L, then O, then G, she understood that you probably meant LOGIN, and she herself added IN. So I entered L.
I was on the line with Duvall from SRI, and I said, “Did you get the L?” He says, “Yeah.” I said that I saw the L come back and print out on my terminal. And I pressed O and it said, "'O' came." And I pressed G, and he said, “Wait a minute, my system has crashed here.”
Bill Duvall
After a couple of letters, a buffer overflow occurred. It was very easy to find and fix, and basically everything was back up and running after that. I mention this because that's not what this whole story is about. The story of how ARPANET works.
Kline: He had a small error, and he dealt with it in about 20 minutes, and tried to start everything again. He needed to tweak the software. I needed to check my software again. He called me back and we tried again. We started again, I typed L, O, G and this time I got the answer "IN".
Internet Day in different countries
In the USA and Europe the celebration is held on April 4th. There are two versions of the origin of such a date. The first is the similarity of the spelling of 4.04 with the 404 error about the absence of the desired page on the web. The second is religious. It is believed that the patron saint of the World Wide Web is Isidore of Seville, a saint canonized by the Catholic Church. And April 4 is the day of his ascension.
It is interesting that the candidacy of Isidore of Seville has been confirmed by the Vatican since 2000. The Church motivated its decision by the fact that the saint used cross-references in his works - a distant prototype of modern hyperlinks.
The Vatican organized an open vote on one of the Internet resources it supervised on the issue of choosing the patron of the new global web. Thus, we can assume that WWW users themselves supported the decision with their votes.
In Russia, April 7 is often called Internet Day. On this day in 1994, the .ru domain was allocated for Russian websites, replacing the .su domain of the Soviet Union, which had lost its relevance.
Similar to Russia, a number of other countries also consider the birth of the Internet to be the moment when their national domains appeared. For example, in Uzbekistan it is April 29, and WWW users in Ukraine celebrate December 14.
History of Internet technologies and services
Postal services
E-mail has accompanied the Internet throughout its history. As noted above, the first client for reading and sending mail over the World Wide Web was developed in 1971.
Some researchers point us back to 1965, to the Mail program written by Noel Morris and Tom Van Valeck. But this application ran strictly on one CTSS operating system. We installed it on an IBM 7090/7094. Forwarding a message was possible to a computer connected via a local network and running on the same system.
Most of the concepts were inherited from the field of processing paper correspondence. Letter, attachment, envelope - all these words are from an earlier time. But email is much faster and easier to use. You can read it from any device. But at first, users were strictly tied to their provider in order to have access to their email account. The letters themselves were stored on the provider's server.
Hotmail. The history of Internet email is often dated back to July 4, 1996. On this day, the Hotmail service began commercial operation. Revolutionaryness consisted in freedom from the provider. The user could check his email correspondence from any device connected to the web.
GMail. The history of this mail service began in the summer of 2001. At the same time, the corporation was in no hurry to open access to it to a wide range of users. In beta, it became possible to connect to GMail only in April 2004. The key advantage of Google mail was the incredible space for letters at that time. Each user was allocated 1 GB. Competitors provided at most 10 MB. Therefore, Gmail immediately looked like a leader on the Internet and currently occupies the first position in popularity.
Mail.ru and Yandex Mail. The mail service Mail.ru has been operating since 1998. Perhaps this is the oldest such resource in RuNet. Yandex joined the mailer race later. The service appeared on the Russian segment of the Internet in June 2000. He was distinguished by competent implementation of spam identification and anti-virus processing of attachments directly on the Yandex server.
Search engines
From the very beginning, the Internet was not easy to search. To find something useful, you had to find out the site address, type it into the browser bar, and then follow the links in the form of underlined letters for a long time.
YAHOO. The first search engine was YAHOO. Its two founders wanted to learn more about basketball teams. David Filo and Jerry Yang were left without their supervisor for a long period and had a lot of free time.
In January 1994, they found a solution to indexing a large amount of information and opened the “Guide” to the world, which at this stage of Internet development was a breakthrough in navigation. It was a directory of sites.
From that moment on, online search developed rapidly, as it attracted financial investments from advertisers. They were happy to place paid ads on search engines, which receive a huge number of visitors every day.
Google. Google's revolutionary invention was the combination of a natural way for people to search for a phrase and ranking links. A simple rule to determine the best pages is this: if site A has a link to site B, then page B gets a point. Now this is called the citation index, TIC.
Currently, no user will be able to navigate more than 150 million sites on the Internet. The search engine string is now displayed in the address page of most browsers.
Yandex. For Russian users on RuNet, the Russian-language sector of the Internet, the search began with Rambler. This Russian project started in 1996, just three years later than the first American search engines. Yandex appeared on the Internet a year later, in 1997, but is currently consistently in the top 10 global search services. In the Russian Internet sector, it is reliably in first place.
Browsers
WorldWideWeb. The race for the right to be called the best guide for users on the Internet began in the 90s of the last century. The first of these programs was simply called WorldWideWeb. As the name suggests, this is WWW, a combination of letters that often refers to the Internet. The browser was renamed Nexus, and then it gave way to more advanced competitors.
Mosaic. Few Russian users know about this web surfing tool, but it was the first to offer a graphical interface. There is evidence that both popular browsers of the 90s: Netscape navigator and IE borrowed the code of this open source project in the initial stages of development.
Netscape Navigator is the first browser with in-line search. It appeared in 1994 and existed until December 28, 2007. For most Russian users, this is where their acquaintance with the Internet began.
Google Chrome, without which the Internet today is difficult to imagine, appeared only in 2008. Its source code is open and the Chromium engine is used in most modern web browsers, including the latest versions of Opera and Yandex.
History of the Internet in Russia
The graph of the development of the World Wide Web in the Russian-speaking space from the moment when the Internet was created and invented in the world is clearly demonstrated by the diagram.
On the graph, the X axis shows the years since 1990, and the Y axis shows millions of addresses issued to users and sites.
It is a mistake to believe that American researchers are decades ahead of their Soviet and Russian colleagues. The first local networks in the USSR were created in the military sphere in the 1950s. And in 1972, our civilian specialists managed to solve a problem on a nationwide scale. The Express ticket sales accounting network has been implemented, the services of which we now use when purchasing train tickets via the Internet.
There were also philosophers in Russia who formulated the fundamentals of the functioning of global world networks. Odoevsky mentions such a system in his science fiction book 4338. She was published in 1837.
Key stages in the emergence of the Internet in Russia.
1974 The KOI-8 encoding was developed, which included Cyrillic and Latin letters. This made it possible to create a standard for texts in mixed languages. KOI-8 is enshrined in GOST. In the same year, Academician Sakharov predicted the creation of a worldwide network - a world library of knowledge - in the next half century.
1982 Anatoly Kolesov conducts world conferences using computers using telephone lines. He was given a login to log into the server of the University of Stockholm.
1985 The teleconference was advertised by the magazine Science and Life in one of its articles.
1988 Kolesov was invited to a Central Television program to talk about this new technology.
1990 Glasnet, with the help of American colleagues, is organizing the integration of the USSR into the Internet. Several educational institutions in our country have access to the network. In the summer of the same year, the Demos company opened an email service in the USSR.
by 1991, postal service was organized in all major cities of the Union.
Since 1993, the history of the Internet in Russia has already kept pace with global experience. Providers appeared to provide access to the network through the telephone network using modems. Ordinary people, not just select scientific organizations, connected to the WWW.
April 7, 1994. The RU segment appeared. Russian servers gradually began to replace SU with RU.
