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The internet is a massive global network that connects users around the world. It consists of websites (using basic html), emails, search engines, and chat rooms. It allows users to quickly send and receive information.
The internet has come about very recently, but it has had a long history to get here. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) decided to fund the project ARPANET in the 1960s. At the time, the US was scared of an invasion by the USSR. They wanted a secure way to share information across vast distances in the crumbing of a wall, and that’s how ARPANET was born. Paul Baran, in the early 1960s, pioneered packet switching which breaks down data into contained packets that travel independently across a network. Lawrence Roberts led ARPANET’s 1969 launch and oversaw the connection of the first four nodes to prove that packet switching worked across distances. After that came TCP/IP. ARPANET was incorporated into this new network that could be scalable infinitely. Different networks were allowed to interconnect, with TCP/IP serving as a common language for them to exchange data. It was created by the masterminds Bob Khan and Vint Cerf in the mid 70s. Paul Mockepetris and Jon Postel were the inventors of DN, which converts web domains like .com, and .net into a string of numbers also called an IP, that computers could read. And then along came Tim-Berners-Lee: And voila just like that, a random scientist at CERN had released the WWW in 1993. He went on to create some of the most revolutionary tools such as HTML, HTTP and Browsers. The Internet was gaining steam and started to become a household tool across the globe in the 90s. Marc Andreessen created one of the first widely used browsers, the mosaic browser that was the first experience of the web for many users. Tim Berners-Lee is the person most people think of when they think of the founding father of the internet, but a lot of the other engineers and contributors to the internet are unknown and deserve more credit. We hope that you now have a better understanding of the history of the internet and the people who developed it.
The advent of the internet has had a great impact on people, as more and more users use the internet every day. The amount of information cannot be understated and has a great effect on educating people on what's going on around them. Communicating over long distances or short ones has become trivially easy thanks to the internet. This communication has alloweed for people to find community with one another even across continents. The internet has also allowed many rural or hard-to-reach places access to the world at large, boosting the resources they can access. The internet has done a lot for us, for sure.
The advent of the internet has opened up an entirely brand new market for businesses in the form of E-commerce. This has allowed for the creation of many new businesses and job opportunities that would have not been available otherwise. Even for traditional businesses, programs such as e-mail have increased productivity and lowered operating costs. Additionally, Companies are now able to spread information to a wide audience at unprecedented speeds. Advertising as a whole has had to reinvent itself in the new digital age of marketing. With this new age of marketing comes more globalization as companies can communicate with other companies or other countries much more efficiently. Being in the know when it comes to computers is a valuable position. Everyboody wants to take advantage of the internet but might not know how to, leading to jobs such as coding for businesses, selling computers/computer parts and investing in tech start ups being a good source of profit.
While a great tool, the internet can still be dangerous. Hackers and malware, while not a major problem are understandably a major concern for the public. With limited knowledge of how the internet works, not only can people be manipulated moree easily, but also are more likely to fear the internet. If yoou have kids, it's important to be careful about what they view, as the internet is not all sunshine and rainbows. Although there are no major issues right now, there have been some recent controversies on the internet. Back in 1999 the whole world was concerned about the advent of the year 2000 or Y2K. Computers back then read year dates from two numbers, such as 95, being read as 1995, but everyone was worried that when it hit 2000 or 00 that it would read as 1900 and electronics would stop functioning or yearly changes such as interest rates would crash. Luckily, this didn't end up happening. Due to the work of many computer experts the world was well prepared for the year 2000 and ultimately nothing really happened. Around the same time, the dot com bubble was in full swing. Online or “dotcom” businesses were on the rise with investors jumping at the chance to invest in them. Eventually though, so much money was invested that when the businesses failed and interest rose. The world fell into a serious economic depression. Though using the internet should be a positive experience, you should always be careful out there.
The internet has made way for tons of people in rural areas, often with little access to the outside world, to have an easier time connecting with others and gaining access to other resources. Commercial and government websites are starting to have a bigger impact on the world around us. In the future, we will likely have Internet 2.0 and maybe even Internet 3.0, all the way in 2026. E-commerce will probably continue to get better and used more often. No matter what happens, it all started here in internet 1.0.