Kristeljane M.

Ronquillo
BS Tourism II
HISTORY OF INTERNET
The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early
1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share
information on research and development in scientific and military fields.
Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet
switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence
Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California
computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of
wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit
switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was
confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency) in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These
visionaries and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the
Internet.
The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a
contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
which initially connected four major computers at universities in the
southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the
University of Utah).
Who was the first to use the Internet?
Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on ARPANet as he tried to
connect to Stanford Research Institute on Oct 29, 1969. The system crashed
as he reached the G in LOGIN!

The Internet was designed to provide a communications network that would

work even if some of the major sites were down. The early Internet was used
by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians.
Did Al Gore invent the Internet?
According to a CNN transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Al Gore
said,"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in
creating the Internet." Al Gore was not yet in Congress in 1969 when
ARPANET started or in 1974 when the term Internet first came into use. Gore
was elected to Congress in 1976. In fairness, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf
acknowledge in a paper titled Al Gore and the Internet that Gore has

probably done more than any other elected official to support the growth and
development of the Internet from the 1970's to the present.
E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He picked
the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the
username and address. The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote
computer, was published as a Request for Comments (RFC) in 1972. RFC's
are a means of sharing developmental work throughout community.
The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published
as an RFC in 1973, and from then on RFC's were available electronically to
anyone who had use of the ftp protocol.
The Internet matured in the 70's as a result of the TCP/IP architecture first
proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further developed by Kahn and Vint Cerf
at Stanford and others throughout the 70's. It was adopted by the Defense
Department in 1980 replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP) and
universally adopted by 1983.
In 1986, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country
56 Kbps backbone for the Internet. They maintained their sponsorship for
nearly a decade, setting rules for its non-commercial government and
research uses.
As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were standardized, it became a
lot easier for non-technical people to learn to use the nets. It was not easy by
today's standards by any means, but it did open up use of the Internet to
many more people in universities in particular. Other departments besides
the libraries, computer, physics, and engineering departments found ways to
make good use of the nets--to communicate with colleagues around the
world and to share files and resources.
While the number of sites on the Internet was small, it was fairly easy to
keep track of the resources of interest that were available. But as more and
more universities and organizations--and their libraries-- connected, the
Internet became harder and harder to track. There was more and more need
for tools to index the resources that were available.
The first effort, other than library catalogs, to index the Internet was created
in 1989, as Peter Deutsch and Alan Emtage, students at McGill University in
Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which they named Archie. This
software would periodically reach out to all known openly available ftp sites,
list their files, and build a searchable index of the software. The commands
to search Archie were unix commands, and it took some knowledge of unix
to use it to its full capability.

McGill University, which hosted the first Archie, found out one day that half
the Internet traffic going into Canada from the United States was accessing
Archie. Administrators were concerned that the University was subsidizing
such a volume of traffic, and closed down Archie to outside access.
Fortunately, by that time, there were many more Archies available.
McGill University, which hosted the first Archie, found out one day that half
the Internet traffic going into Canada from the United States was accessing
Archie. Administrators were concerned that the University was subsidizing
such a volume of traffic, and closed down Archie to outside access.
Fortunately, by that time, there were many more Archies available.
Peter Scott of the University of Saskatchewan, recognizing the need to bring
together information about all the telnet-accessible library catalogs on the
web, as well as other telnet resources, brought out his Hytelnet catalog in
1990. It gave a single place to get information about library catalogs and
other telnet resources and how to use them. He maintained it for years, and
added HyWebCat in 1997 to provide information on web-based catalogs.
In 1991, the first really friendly interface to the Internet was developed at the
University of Minnesota. The University wanted to develop a simple menu
system to access files and information on campus through their local
network. A debate followed between mainframe adherents and those who
believed in smaller systems with client-server architecture. The mainframe
adherents "won" the debate initially, but since the client-server advocates
said they could put up a prototype very quickly, they were given the goahead to do a demonstration system. The demonstration system was called
a gopher after the U of Minnesota mascot--the golden gopher. The gopher
proved to be very prolific, and within a few years there were over 10,000
gophers around the world. It takes no knowledge of unix or computer
architecture to use. In a gopher system, you type or click on a number to
select the menu selection you want.
Delphi was the first national commercial online service to offer Internet
access to its subscribers. It opened up an email connection in July 1992 and
full Internet service in November 1992. All pretenses of limitations on
commercial use disappeared in May 1995 when the National Science
Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone, and all traffic
relied on commercial networks. AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online.
Since commercial usage was so widespread by this time and educational
institutions had been paying their own way for some time, the loss of NSF
funding had no appreciable effect on costs.
As the Internet has become ubiquitous, faster, and increasingly accessible to
non-technical communities, social networking and collaborative services

have grown rapidly, enabling people to communicate and share interests in

many
more
ways.
Sites
like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, delicious, blogs, wikis, and many more let
people of all ages rapidly share their interests of the moment with others
everywhere.