The History of the Internet
We can trace the internet back to the early
days of computer networking in the late 1960s. In July 1968, the US Department of Defense, Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) issued a proposal requesting the development of protocols to link four sites: Stanford Research Institute, University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Santa Barbara and University of Utah.
They were connected in the autumn of 1969, and the network was called the ARPAnet. Limited facilities were available, but users could perform remote login, that is a user of the University of Los Angeles could log into the computer at the University of Utah, and could transfer files between the systems.
By 1981, 200 sites were connected together via the ARPAnet which was composed of many incompatible networks using different types of technology. The problems of enabling the communication between users of different types of technology were partially overcome by the specification of the communications protocols, TCP and IP.
By the mid 1980s all US and many worldwide inter-university networks were all using TCP/IP protocols to communicate. As the use of the internet grew, some businesses began to realize that it was a highly exploitable resource. Never before, there had been a medium with the capacity to reach so many people across such a wide geographical area in such a short space of time.
This has been increased by the influence of the World Wide Web, a mechanism for publishing information and offering electronic services for anyone with access to the internet. The World Wide Web was first implemented during 1992 when there were 50 web servers. By the end of 1993 there were 700 servers on the web and at the turn of the millennium the numbers involved are so enormous, that no-one is prepared to estimate exactly how many web servers exist, or at what rate they are increasing.