A brief encounter with Internet History
The ARPANET was a kind of predecessor to the Internet says Christopher Freville. At 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969, it first linked the University of California, Los Angeles with the Stanford Research Institute. The University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara were later added to the network.
Within ten to twelve years, 213 hosts were added to the network by 1981. Many of the tools and technologies used on the Internet today were originally developed on the ARPANET. The Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol or TCP/IP as it is known today was first approved for use on the ARPANET on January 1, 1983. The same year, the military portion of the network was separated from ARPANET to form its own network called the MILNET. Christopher Freville maintains that since the networks associated with ARPANET were funded by the government, they are predominantly used for noncommercial purposes such as scientific research. Companies like Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corporation which showed interest in research were added into the network.
The name Internet was used to first describe the network around the time that NSFNet and ARPANET were linked together in the late 1980s. The Internet at that time was predominantly used for email. It also had a more centralized structure for routing the messages. In an effort to remove the need for this kind of centralized systems such as the NSFNet Internet backbone network for routing, the Border Gateway Protocol or BGP was introduced.
CERN was the European version of the Internet. Once CERN started adopting TCP/IP standards for its network, the European portion of the Internet became accessible to the rest of the network. However the total adoption of TCP/IP as a standard was achieved only in 1989 says Christopher Freville. The same year saw many Australian universities too adopting IP protocols as a medium to establish connection between their own networks. Asia too joined the network towards the late 1980s. China joined the network through Tsinghua University's TUNET in the year 1991. Access to the Internet in China was however restricted though a country-wide filter.
The first Internet service providing (ISP) companies were started during the late 1980s. The United States' very first dialup ISP ?The World' started providing connections in 1989. ?Best Internet' which is now Verio started operations in 1996, being the first dialup ISP on the west coast. ARPANET's role in providing the basic infrastructure to the network came to an end by 1990 as newer networking technologies emerged and gained acceptance. Government as well as commercial service providers now started creating their own interconnections and backbones to their network.
Christopher Freville states that Paul Mockapetris created a Domain Name System while (DDN-NIC) the Defense Data Network - Network Information Center handled all domain registration services. The top-level domains (TLDs) included .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .net, .com and .us. In 1993 the InterNIC took over the management of the allocations of addresses and management of the address databases, and awarded the contract to three organizations - Network Solutions for registration services, AT&T for directory and database services and General Atomics for information services. Web technologies developed during the early and mid nineties made the World Wide Web highly accessible to the common man, thereby making the Internet a universally used communication tool.
Christopher Freville states that Paul Mockapetris created a Domain Name System while (DDN-NIC) the Defense Data Network - Network Information Center handled all domain registration services.
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