Editing History of the Internet (section)

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The history of the [[Internet]] originated in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect [[computer network]]s. The [[Internet protocol suite|Internet Protocol Suite]], the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the [[United States]] and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the [[United Kingdom]] and [[France]].<ref name="Abbatep3">{{harvnb|Abbate|1999|p=[https://books.google.com/books?id=9BfZxFZpElwC&pg=PA3 3] "The manager of the ARPANET project, Lawrence Roberts, assembled a large team of computer scientists ... and he drew on the ideas of network experimenters in the United States and the United Kingdom. Cerf and Kahn also enlisted the help of computer scientists from England, France and the United States"}}</ref><ref name=":3">{{cite web|url=https://www.sri.com/newsroom/press-releases/computer-history-museum-sri-international-and-bbn-celebrate-40th-anniversary|title=The Computer History Museum, SRI International, and BBN Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of First ARPANET Transmission, Precursor to Today's Internet|date=27 October 2009|publisher=SRI International|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190329134941/https://www.sri.com/newsroom/press-releases/computer-history-museum-sri-international-and-bbn-celebrate-40th-anniversary|archive-date=March 29, 2019|access-date=25 September 2017|quote=But the ARPANET itself had now become an island, with no links to the other networks that had sprung up. By the early 1970s, researchers in France, the UK, and the U.S. began developing ways of connecting networks to each other, a process known as internetworking.}}</ref><ref name=":4">{{cite web|url=http://elk.informatik.hs-augsburg.de/tmp/cdrom-oss/CerfHowInternetCame2B.html|title=How the Internet Came to Be|author1=by Vinton Cerf, as told to Bernard Aboba|date=1993|access-date=25 September 2017|quote=We began doing concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN, and University College London. So effort at developing the Internet protocols was international from the beginning.|archive-date=September 26, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170926042220/http://elk.informatik.hs-augsburg.de/tmp/cdrom-oss/CerfHowInternetCame2B.html}}</ref>

[[Computer science]] was an emerging discipline in the late 1950s that began to consider [[time-sharing]] between computer users, and later, the possibility of achieving this over [[wide area network]]s. [[J. C. R. Licklider]] developed the idea of a universal network at the [[Information Processing Techniques Office]] (IPTO) of the United States [[United States Department of Defense|Department of Defense]] (DoD) [[DARPA|Advanced Research Projects Agency]] (ARPA). Independently, [[Paul Baran]] at the [[RAND Corporation]] proposed a distributed network based on data in message blocks in the early 1960s, and [[Donald Davies]] conceived of [[packet switching]] in 1965 at the [[National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom)|National Physical Laboratory]] (NPL), proposing a national commercial data network in the United Kingdom.

ARPA awarded contracts in 1969 for the development of the [[ARPANET]] project, directed by [[Robert Taylor (computer scientist)|Robert Taylor]] and managed by [[Lawrence Roberts (scientist)|Lawrence Roberts]]. ARPANET adopted the packet switching technology proposed by Davies and Baran. The network of [[Interface Message Processor|Interface Message Processors]] (IMPs) was built by a team at [[Bolt, Beranek, and Newman]], with the design and specification led by [[Bob Kahn]]. The host-to-host protocol was specified by a group of graduate students at [[University of California, Los Angeles|UCLA]], led by [[Steve Crocker]], along with [[Jon Postel]] and others. The ARPANET expanded rapidly across the United States with connections to the United Kingdom and Norway.

Several [[Packet switching#Packet-switched networks|early packet-switched networks]] emerged in the 1970s which researched and provided [[computer network|data networking]]. [[Louis Pouzin]] and [[Hubert Zimmermann]] pioneered a simplified end-to-end approach to [[internetworking]] at the [[INRIA|IRIA]]. [[Peter T. Kirstein|Peter Kirstein]] put internetworking into practice at [[University College London]] in 1973. [[Robert Metcalfe|Bob Metcalfe]] developed the theory behind [[Ethernet]] and the [[PARC Universal Packet]]. ARPA initiatives and the [[International Network Working Group]] developed and refined ideas for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a ''network of networks''. [[Vint Cerf]], now at [[Stanford University]], and Bob Kahn, now at DARPA, published their research on internetworking in 1974. Through the [[Internet Experiment Note]] series and later [[Request for Comments|RFCs]] this evolved into the [[Transmission Control Protocol]] (TCP) and [[Internet Protocol]] (IP), two protocols of the [[Internet protocol suite]]. The design included concepts pioneered in the French [[CYCLADES]] project directed by Louis Pouzin. The development of packet switching networks was underpinned by mathematical work in the 1970s by [[Leonard Kleinrock]] at UCLA.{{Internet history timeline}}In the late 1970s, national and international [[public data network]]s emerged based on the [[X.25]] protocol, designed by [[Rémi Després]] and others. In the United States, the [[National Science Foundation]] (NSF) funded national [[Supercomputer|supercomputing]] centers at several universities in the United States, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the [[NSFNET]] project, thus creating network access to these supercomputer sites for research and academic organizations in the United States. International connections to NSFNET, the emergence of architecture such as the [[Domain Name System]], and the [[Internet protocol suite#Adoption|adoption of TCP/IP]] on existing networks in the United States and around the world marked the beginnings of the [[Internet]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.internethalloffame.org/blog/2015/10/19/untold-internet|title=The Untold Internet|date=October 19, 2015|website=Internet Hall of Fame|access-date=April 3, 2020|quote=many of the milestones that led to the development of the modern Internet are already familiar to many of us: the genesis of the ARPANET, the implementation of the standard network protocol TCP/IP, the growth of LANs (Large Area Networks), the invention of DNS (the Domain Name System), and the adoption of American legislation that funded U.S. Internet expansion—which helped fuel global network access—to name just a few.}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |date=2014 |title=Study into UK IPv4 and IPv6 allocations |url=https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0031/37795/rtfm.pdf |journal=Reid Technical Facilities Management LLP |quote=As the network continued to grow, the model of central co-ordination by a contractor funded by the US government became unsustainable. Organisations were using IP-based networking even if they were not directly connected to the ARPAnet. They needed to get globally unique IP addresses. The nature of the ARPAnet was also changing as it was no longer limited to organisations working on ARPA-funded contracts. The US National Science Foundation set up a national IP-based backbone network, NSFnet, so that its grant-holders could be interconnected to supercomputer centres, universities and various national/regional academic/research networks, including ARPAnet. That resulting network of networks was the beginning of today's Internet.}}</ref><ref name=":2">{{cite web | title=Origins of the Internet | website=www.nethistory.info | date=2 May 2005 | url=http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/origins.html | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110903001108/http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/origins.html | archive-date=3 September 2011 | url-status=live}}</ref> Commercial [[Internet service provider]]s (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/OzI04.html#CIAP|title=Origins and Nature of the Internet in Australia|last=Clarke|first=Roger|access-date=21 January 2014|archive-date=9 February 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210209201253/http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/OzI04.html#CIAP|url-status=live}}</ref> Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.indra.com/homepages/spike/isp.html |title=The First ISP |publisher=Indra.com |date=1992-08-13 |access-date=2015-10-17  |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160305130609/https://www.indra.com/homepages/spike/isp.html |archive-date=March 5, 2016 }}</ref> The optical backbone of the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic, as traffic transitioned to optical networks managed by Sprint, MCI and AT&T in the United States.

Research at [[CERN]] in [[Switzerland]] by the British computer scientist [[Tim Berners-Lee]] in 1989–90 resulted in the [[World Wide Web]], linking [[hypertext]] documents into an information system, accessible from any [[Node (networking)|node]] on the network.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Couldry|first1=Nick |title=Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice |date=2012 |publisher=Polity Press |location=London|page=2|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=AcHvP9trbkAC&pg=PA2|isbn=978-0-7456-3920-8}}</ref> The dramatic expansion of the capacity of the Internet, enabled by the advent of [[Wavelength-division multiplexing|wave division multiplexing]] (WDM) and the rollout of [[Fiber-optic cable|fiber optic cables]] in the mid-1990s, had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology. This made possible the rise of near-instant communication by [[email|electronic mail]], [[instant messaging]], [[voice over Internet Protocol]] (VoIP) telephone calls, [[video chat]], and the World Wide Web with its [[discussion forums]], [[blogs]], [[social networking service]]s, and [[online shopping]] sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over [[Fiber-optic communication|fiber-optic networks]] operating at 1 [[Gbits/sec|Gbit/s]], 10&nbsp;Gbit/s, and 800&nbsp;Gbit/s by 2019.<ref>{{Cite news|last=Nelson|first=Patrick|date=March 20, 2019|title=Data center fiber to jump to 800 gigabits in 2019.|work=Network World|url=https://www.networkworld.com/article/3374545/data-center-fiber-to-jump-to-800-gigabits-in-2019.html}}</ref> The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was rapid in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way [[telecommunications]] networks in the year 1993, 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.<ref name="HilbertLopez2011">{{cite journal |last1=Hilbert |first1=Martin |last2=López |first2=Priscila |title=The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information |journal=Science |date=April 2011 |volume=332 |issue=6025 |pages=60–65 |doi=10.1126/science.1200970 |pmid=21310967 |bibcode=2011Sci...332...60H |s2cid=206531385 |doi-access=free }}</ref> The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and [[social networking service]]s. However, the future of the global network may be shaped by regional differences.<ref name="NYT-20181015">{{cite news |author=The Editorial Board |title=There May Soon Be Three Internets. America's Won't Necessarily Be the Best. – A breakup of the web grants privacy, security and freedom to some, and not so much to others. |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/opinion/internet-google-china-balkanization.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220102/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/opinion/internet-google-china-balkanization.html |archive-date=2022-01-02 |url-access=limited |url-status=live |date=15 October 2018 |work=[[The New York Times]] |access-date=16 October 2018 }}{{cbignore}}</ref>