Internet History Timeline
Without Internet access more than 60% of the businesses in the United States would not exist. This percentage cannot be exact by its very nature but it is probably not far off, and could actually be conservative. Almost all business research is done using the Internet, and communications as well as professional networking would slow to a crawl without it. Remove email and more than half of all private communication would require a different medium or become impossible altogether. The Internet by any standard has become a necessary part of American life both at home and in the office. So when did this miracle of technology come into being?
To find out when it started, we need to know what the Internet is. William F. Slater, III said in 1996 that the Internet was “A network of networks, joining many government, university and private computers together and providing an infrastructure for the use of E-mail, bulletin boards, file archives, hypertext documents, databases and other computational resources.”
Slater, who was the President of the Chicago Chapter of the Internet Society, also said that the Internet is, “The vast collection of computer networks which form and act as a single huge network for transport of data and messages across distances which can be anywhere from the same office to anywhere in the world.” This defines the Internet in terms of hardware, software, data and even users. Without all of these of course there would be no Internet so that alone lends a great deal of credence to this definition. With the Internet defined the roots may become easier to find.
Tom Standage, in his 1998 book The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers suggests the Telegraph was the birth of the Internet. He’s not alone in this belief and the idea of a wired communications infrastructure was born with that remarkable invention. The Internet of today however is most often looked at through its communications technology and not the pipes in which the data travels. This suggests that the Internet was born with the idea of packet switching.
Major sections of our Internet History include:
- Early Origins of the Internet
- ARPANET - The Precursor to the Internet
- The Birth of the Modern Internet
- and the Birth of the World Wide Web
Many scholars would line up to support the idea that packet switching is the starting point of the Internet. Unfortunately there would be division in the ranks on where the credit should go to. Paul Baran who explored the idea of packet switching in the early 1960’s would get equal support to Donald Davies or Leonard Kleinrock. In 1961 Kleinrock published a book on the subject of “message switching”, and is called “The Father of the Internet” at UCLA where he is a computer science professor. Collectively these three men are most often looked at as the creators of the Internet, even if the importance of the individuals to the overall result is debated.
The speed of the Internet has increased greatly since it was first put into operation. Today's high speed Internet Providers are implementing residential connections that provide download speeds between 50 Mpbs to 100 Mpbs and faster.