History of the Internet

                                                    History of the Internet

                   The Internet was developed by the U.S Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency in the early 1969 bearing the name ARPA wide area network (ARPANET). Motivated by the Cold War, the Department of Defense Was seeking to establish a decentralized communication network which would be more resilient to a bomb attack than the telephone system. To achieve this goal, the Department of Defense would need a robust network capable of functioning when individual nodes were crashed. That is, unlike the telephone system which could be rendered largely useless when a few key carriers were destroyed, the Internet would remain functional. As a result of these objectives, the Internet has the ability to automatically re-route the information it carries, whereas the telephone system does not.

     

                   By the late 1970's, several computer networks were using ARPANET; however, the technology did not exist to allow communication between networks. ARPANET could be utilized to establish network communication, but there did not exist a standard technology that would allow different networks to communicate with one another. Therefore, in its early form, ARPANET did not support internet work communication and was not a 'true' internet, rather, it was a system of independent networks. Initially, the Internet connected a small group of research centers located at major universities and the Department of Defense. These research centers were mainly involved in military technology projects. Use of ARPANET was soon extended to other major universities. The consequent growth and diversity of the Internet is largely related, directly of indirectly, to the research and applications of universities.

                Due to the growth in the demand for Internet usage, by the mid 1980's it was apparent that ARPANET did not have sufficient capacity to meet future needs. In 1989, ARPANET was decommissioned and replaced by a network managed by the National science Foundation (NSF). The resulting network was known as the NSFNET. Shortly after the development of the NSFNET, it again became clear that capacity was not sufficient to meet growing demand. In addition, the U.S. government realized that it could not continue to fund the Internet indefinitely Therefore, the government looked to private industry for development and funding. IBM, MERIT, and MCI formed a non-profit corporation ot fund research and development of a new wide area network backbone, the ANSNET, the capacity of which was 30 times that of NSFNET. In 1995, MCI developed a new wide area network backbone know as the very high-speed backbone network system, vBNS.

                Thus, the Internet has gone through several capacity expansions and technological  developments since its inception in the late 1960's. These developments have been driven by the demand for access and bandwidth. In addition to the scope of the Internet's expansion, it is significant that the Internet is attracting the interest and funding of the private sector rather being developed solely by the public sector.