The need for the Internet arose from two things: universities wanted to be able to exchange information freely and the military was concerned about keeping their networks going in case of a major war. The history of the internet evolves around this research.
It comes as no surprise therefore that the bulk of research was initially carried out by the universities. They started writing protocols to enable file sharing between their computers. Anyone who had a personal computer during the ’80s will know that different computers didn’t necessarily speak each other’s language during those early days.
These initial primitive networks were only used by computer geeks and scientists. It was not open to the general public, but only to members of the particular university’s staff or students that were give specific access. The whole concept evolved around file sharing.
One of these file sharing services was called FTP, which stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is still widely used on the Internet at this very moment. If you have a website, for example, you would use an FTP program to transfer the files from your personal computer to the web server.
Thousands and thousands of hours were spent on research at the universities during the ’80s and ’90s to develop a menu system, so any user could access a list of files that are available on the system and select a specific file for download simply by typing its name or selecting it.
A huge step in the right direction was when the scientists at the European Laboratory for Partical Physics (located in Switzerland, in short called CERN) developed the basic principles of what we call http today during 1991. Hypertext transfer protocol is in layman’s terms the ability to create links in a page of information so anyone clicking on that link will be taken to that other page. This is still what makes the web work today.
The next huge step forward came with the introduction of the web browser. This suddenly enabled anyone logged on to the network to browse through thousands or millions of files by simply following hyperlinks on the different pages. Mosaic was the first graphical web browser and it was introduced during 1993. Others soon followed, including Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
At the beginning the web was intended solely for non-commercial use. Commercial use was frowned upon by the scientists who developed the whole system. They could, however, not keep the private networks out. During the 1990s commercial networks offering services such as email and web browsing started to spring up all over the place. The history of the Internet is a work in progress. Every day new developments take place and the end is not in sight yet.
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