UTK - Math 171 - Alexiades

            Brief History of the Internet and WWW

Networks, TCP/IP
Enabling computers to talk to each other is NOT simple, nor easy, took many years of intensive research and developement
since the early 1970s. Almost all of it was funded by federal agencies, mainly DARPA, NSF, DOE.
Need to speak same language, a common Protocol, which now is TCP/IP.
Also need programs, running at both ends, to interpred the msgs.
First came EMAIL, then FTP, then TELNET, ..., now there are many.

Timeline

  • 1962: Paul Baran of RAND proposed Distributed Communications Networks
  • 1969: ARPAnet created, funded by DARPA, first packet switching network
            29 Oct 1969: first successful remote connection (Leonard Kleinrock, from UCLA to Stanford)
  • 1971: first email (Ray Tomlinson)
  • 1972: ARPAnet has 40 nodes
  • 1974: early protocol for internetworking
  • 1976: uucp (unix to unix copy) protocol at Bell Labs
  • 1979: Usenet: User News Groups come into existence
  • 1981: BITNET, mailing lists (listserv)
  • 1/1/1983: Revolution! TCP/IP launched to create the Internet (Interconnected Networks), mostly funded by DARPA,
      after a decade of research on how to make computers, running different operating systems, communicate,
      Fathers: Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn
      First domains: ARPAnet/milnet (became .mil), then CSnet (for universities, became .edu), bitnet, NSFnet, ...

    First protocols for communication:
  • EMAIL: the first internet protocol: one machine sends file to another machine, asynchronus, plain text only
  • FTP=File Transfer Protocol: synchronus, requires account on remote machine.
      Anonymous FTP existed for a while but now disallowed for security
  • telnet (early 80s) synchronus, text only, character by character so can login to remote machine, requires account.
      Now dead, replaced by SSH for security

  • 1984: DNS = Domain Name Service, created at U.Wisconsin: translate name to/from IP address via table lookup.
      DNS was designed and proved to be robust, but not efficient (many servers may need to be contacted for a connection),
      nor necessarily secure...
  • 1986: NSFnet created by NSF-NASA-DOE, for universities, national labs.
  • mid 1980's: X windows developed at MIT Media Lab (Athena project) with federal (and computer vendors) funding, so freely available:
      Revolution! first universal GUI (on unix only), enables remote display via client-server service:
      "server" provides content to "client" who displays it, separated content from display! Crucial ingredient for WWW!
  • 1990?: Gopher created at U.Minnesota: text-only files downloading with a click on a numbered menu, idea of Ted Nelson, 1974.
  • 1991: WWW=World Wide Web launched, by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva. Revolution! HyperText links invented.
      New ingredients: HTTP =HyperTextTransferProtocol , HTML =HyperTextMarkupLanguage to create docs ,
                    browser: GUI to display HTML documents
  • 1993: Mosaic web browser created at NCSA(National Center for Supercomputing Applications, U.Illinois U-C)
      designed by Mark Andreessen, and made freely available.
      -InterNIC (Internet Network Information Service) by NSF to provide info, registration, assign domain names to IP
      Top level domains created: .com .edu .gov .mil .net .org
  • 1994: Netscape, revolutionary browser by Mark Andreessen. existed for about a decade, replaced by Mozilla Firefox
  • 1995: end of NSFnet backbone.
      -Microsoft launches Windows95 OS, graphics-based, like MacOS.
      -Amazon online bookstore launched.
  • 1998: Google search engine launched.
  • 2004: Facebook
  • 2005: YouTube
  • 2006: Twitter
  • 2011: top level IPv4 addresses exhausted in 2 of the 5 RIRs (Regional Internet Registries)
  • 2015: IPv4 32-bit addresses (232 ~ 4.3 billion) exhausted!
      due to explosion in devices (each needs at least one address) and methods of allocation by region and by Class A,B,C
      Gradual transition to IPv6 128-bit addresses, 10^38 possible, plenty for forseeable future!
  • Since 1998, IP addresses are managed by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).
      There are several top-level domains today, registered on 13 core DNS servers around the world.

    Early growth of the web
  • Jan 1995: 5 million IP addresses
  • Jan 1996: 14 million
  • Jan 1997: 22 million
  • Jan 1998: 30 million
  • in 2000: 350 million !!! explosion! There are many billions today!
    Top five domains in Jan.1998: .com : 8.2 M , .edu : 5.3 M , .net : 3.9 M , .jp : 1.2 M , .mil : 1.1 M
    Other top-level domains were created soon after: .gov , .org , etc. Clearly .com has conquered all...