On the fourth of October in 1957
an event occurred that would
change the world. The Soviet Union successfully launched the first satellite
into earths orbit, called “sputnik I”, it shocked the world -especially the United States of America, who had there own programme of satellites launches underway, but had yet
to launch.
The event led directly to the creation of the US Department of Defence ARPA (The Advanced
Research Project Agency),
due to a recognized need for
an organization that could research and develop advanced ideas and technology beyond the currently identified
needs. Their most famous project was the creation of the
internet.
In 1960 a computer scientist Joseph
Likclider published a paper entitled
‘Man-Computer Symbiosis” which articulated the idea of networked computers providing advanced information storage and
retrieval.
The plan for this computer network (to be called ARPANET) was presented in October 1967,
by December 1969, the first
four computer network was up and
running. The problem that was faced
then was how to connect separate
physical networks without
tying up
network resources for
constant links. This problems was solved by a technique called “packet switching this involves data requests being split into
small chunks (Packets) which can be
processed quickly without blocking
communication from other parties, this
techniques is still in use in
the running of internet today
Robert Kalin and
Vinton cert later created a system that masked
the differences between
networking protocols using a new
standard and it was called “internet
transmission control program”. The end
result of this was that it became
possible to easily join almost
all networks together.
In 1982, the
ARPANET connections outside United States of America were all converted to the
new TCP/IOP protocol, hence the internet.
Chronologically,
the developmental history of the internet can be seen as follows
1969: ARPANET
(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network ) designed to support military
research
1972: ARPANET was put into operation, presented to
the publics and were able to
access it
1981: ARPANET
and CSNET(Network of the Computer Science Researchers) were connected.
1990 : ARPANET has become obsolete and was eliminated. The
connection between many different
networks, communicating by means of TCP
/IP was called internet;
CONCLUSION
The importance
of internet to our daily life cannot be overemphasized. From Charley Kline
on October 29,
1967 (first to use the internet), the internet is now being used by virtually everybody and now
the world is no more referred to as a
global village, rather we now have the world
in our palms, courtesy of the
internet. Now more than 4 million hosts
and over 30 million academic,
commercial national and private users
take advantage of the internet information,
and the number is still growing.