Unit 1: Introduction to the Internet
Lesson 1.1: Brief History of the Internet
The Internet and Its History
The first step is to cover a little bit about the Internet and how it has become such an integral part of today's society in a relatively short period of time. The birth of the Internet comes from an experiment started by the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the 1960s. ARPA established a network (ARPANET) with the goal of creating a network that could withstand a disaster the magnitude of a nuclear war. To do this, they had to create a network that would continue to function even if multiple nodes were disabled. The idea was that information being sent over the network would simply be rerouted around the disabled nodes of the network automatically, without affecting the delivery of the information. The initial ARPANET network started in 1969 with nodes in four academic institutions. The network and its many protocols grew and evolved over two decades.
In the mid-1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) used the protocols created by ARPANET to connect five super-computing centers across the United States. These super-computing centers provided a network (NSFNET) for research and academic communications. The network was made available to U.S. research and educational institutions free of charge. This sparked the creation of regional networks to connect to the NSFNET backbone. The NSFNET backbone was restricted to scientific and academic use until 1991, when it was opened to commercial entities.
The opening of the NSFNET backbone to commercial entities caused the Internet to grow exponentially. In 1993, the NSF created InterNIC to provide the following services:
- Directory and database services to provide a directory of online pages and publicly available databases
- Registration services for domain name and IP address assignment
- Support services such as outreach, education, and information services for the Internet community
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Students should complete the following assignment from Student Guide 1:
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