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A paper i wrote about the internet...

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-=HN=- Wild9

Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2001
Location
Dayton, Ohio
well its an older paper, and granted its not the best in the world simply because i had to leave a bunch of stuff out to get it done in time but i figured someone might be intrested in reading it.


If you were to take a poll on how many people surfed the web on a regular basis, you would probably find that every other person that you meet does. Now, if you were to ask those same people who invented the Internet, most would probably reply Al Gore. It is really strange how so many people in this world are on the Internet, but of that many, very few know about its birth. The success of the Internet was primarily based off of the research that ARPANET did and how they implemented their findings to make a Wide Area Network, or WAN.
The person behind the whole theory of a network was Paul Baran of the RAND institute. Baran proposed a theoretical technology called “packet Switching” which allowed two computers to communicate with each other over long distances and if there were many computers connected on the network, a message could be send through any network line to the receiving computer. In 1966, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA was formed and soon after the project was started, they realized that they could not only use this network for military applications but for many applications such as; connecting computers at other colleges and for sharing information between many other research centers (Leiden University). Only three years after the start of the project, which was based entirely on theories, they were able to make history. On October 29th, 1969, computers were connected at UCLA to computers at Stanford and ARPANET was born. ARPANET is considered to be the first WAN. At first, the users could only do three things over the network: Users could only log into a remote computer, print to a remote computer, and transfer files between computers (Leiden University). Even though users could only do those three things over the first network, everyone wanted in on the project.
Another reason that the birth of the Internet came out of the success of ARPANET was due to the fact that they developed network standards. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, was developed by ARPANET in 1974 so that all of the networks across the country could be interconnected. Some people may think that this is not a really big deal, but it was the most important protocol that ARPANET developed. Prior to the implementation of this protocol in the early 1980’s, there were many independent networks across the country. Since they all used different sets of protocols, they could not transfer data from one network to another network. TCP/IP was basically a very flexible transmission protocol. It could be used by any other computer regardless of what their operating system or hardware configuration was. This was very important because with having a standardized system, you could have one large network instead of a bunch of smaller ones. Because of this network of networks, the Internet could not be owned by anyone. Among the people known for TCP/IP, Vincent Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine are the ones thought of when TCP/IP is brought up (THINK Protocols Team). They all wanted to be able to set up interconnected networks and because of this they coined the term Internet.
E-mail is something taken for granted nowadays. Everyone has an e-mail address, but if you went back five to six years ago, not many people had e-mail. Unlike Samuel B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, or Alexander Grahm Bell, the inventor of the telephone, Ray Tomlinson is not a widely known name. All three men made great contributions to the way that people communicate over distances with each other, and there has only been a few times in the past where the way that we communicate with each other has dramatically changed. If this is so, then Ray Tomlinson should be a household name.
Ray Tomlinson worked for BBN, which was one of the first nodes on ARPANET, and was playing around with an electronic messaging program called sndmsg. Sndmsg was not e-mail by any means, but rather a way of leaving an electronic note on a computer for another user to read later. Tomlinson toyed around with the protocols of the program and was able to send a message from one computer, through ARPANET, and back to another computer. Tomlinson had sent the first e-mail in 1971. The @ symbol was also chosen by Tomlinson himself because he was sending a message to a host “at” a certain location. When Tomlinson was successful at setting up his e-mail, he sent news of this accomplishment via e-mail and it was an instant success. In fact, a study conducted in 1973 showed that seventy five percent of all of the traffic on ARPANET was e-mail (ThinkProtocolsTeam). This new form of communication was great because you could get right to the point you were going to make without the small talk involved with telephone conversations, you could get away with not being formal, like if you were writing someone a letter, and you could leave a lengthy message without the person even being at the computer.
As ARPANET grew, the more complex its network became. With more and more hosts being added, the list, for which computer was which on the network quickly, became unmanageable. This list was updated daily and sent to everyone on the network. To solve this increasing problem, the Domain Name Service was introduced in 1984 (HowThingsWork). In this system, a number on the network represented each computer. The number was called the Internet Protocol address, or IP address, and is represented by four groups of octets. The form the IP address was in is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and each group can range from zero to two hundred and fifty-five (Leiden University). Since people are not very good at remembering long strings of numbers, a name is given to that set of numbers and stored in the DNS database. If you were to type in www.whois.com, the computer would search the DNS for whois.com and find the IP address associated with that name. Since names are useless to computers, if a number is not found for that name then the computer returns an error. DNS was extremely helpful in the success of ARPANET because with more and more hosts being added, a new system was needed to quickly and easily figure out which computer was which on the network.
Many people believe that the birth of the Internet was entirely based off of the success of ARPANET, but others believe it was because of one man’s contributions. The work that Tim Berners-Lee did was just that, his. He had no lab or big budget to develop anything he made. He was just a software consultant trying to find a better way to organize his notes. He wrote a program in which he could link words from a text file to other files on his computer and this basically simplified the task of findings things on his computer. The language that Berners-Lee came up with is Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML, and he made this programming language very simple to learn so that anyone who wanted to could put up something on the internet for someone to see (Time). This programming language is so useful that it is still being used today. Lee also designed the Universal Resource Locator, or URL, in which each web page has a different location. Soon after Lee’s development of the URL, he once again came up with Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, so that a document linked from one to computer to someone else’s computer could be viewed. From Tim Berners-Lee’s work we have HTTP://www.whois.com and the World Wide Web debuted in 1991 (Time). Although not well known for it, Tim Berners-Lee also made the first web browser so that other people could view what he made. Without Lee’s contributions to the Internet, we probably would have been set back a few years in developing this way of everyone being connected just by the way that they share their data.
The name most usually thought of when you talk about the first web browser is Mark Andreeson. He was the person who made browsing the net more appealing to the masses. After the release of Mosaic in 1993 Mark Andreeson went on to found Netscape, and become one of the first Internet millionaires. According to Time, because of his first graphical web browser, the number of hosts on the Internet went from 600,000 to over 40 million in just 5 years.
The last major contributor to the success of the Internet is that no one person owns it. There is not a single company that owns the Internet, but everyone who gets on the Internet owns it. If everyone got off the Internet at once, there would be no Internet. The entire Internet is just a bunch of computers all interconnected on networks, all sharing information with one another. Some people may wonder why you are charged for getting online and that is a simple question. You are not paying for the Internet itself; you are just paying your Internet Service Provider to let you have access through their network, to other networks so that you can get on the Internet.
So, in the end, we see that the birth of the Internet came from many great accomplishments in the world of computers, but the most significant of these is still the success of ARPANET. Without the standards like TCP/IP or DNS then the Internet we know today would probably not be around, and we would probably still have a lot of small networks all across the country. If that had happened, computers and the Internet would still be very expensive to go out and buy. Everything computer related would just be proprietary hardware and software so that if you wanted to utilize Whois Brand computers to their maximum potential, it would cost way more than the original purchase price of the machine, and since Whois Brand computers only talk to other Whois Brand computers, you cant talk on the internet to someone who has a Dell. Without all of these contributions, we might not even have a thing called the Internet right now, you might still have to go to the library and search through index cards to find a book, instead of getting on the Internet and searching for it online. We are quickly becoming more and more dependent on the Internet and since that is happening, newer Internet technologies will develop to compensate for our want of an easier life.
 
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