What are the origins of the Internet?

Before I start talking about this topic, I want to remind everyone that the concepts of the Internet and the Web are completely different!

The Internet is a complex network, a global infrastructure of which the web is only one part of the content.

Today on the Internet we share not only web documents but also files, emails, voice, and real-time gaming or financial application data, for example.

As with most great inventions in our world, we cannot credit the invention of the Internet to a single person, but rather to a succession of research efforts carried out by many engineers building on the work of their predecessors.

The fear of a nuclear attack

In the 1960s, the United States was in the midst of the Cold War against the USSR, the space race was raging, and the latter had already gained a considerable lead in telecommunications by sending the first artificial satellite into orbit, named "Sputnik 1".

Scientific research was seen at the time as a source of pride, but above all as a means of domination and survival against "the enemy", particularly with the arrival of second-generation computers, made possible by the invention of the transistor.

Computing then made it possible to perform increasingly complex calculations, and the data collected was both valuable and voluminous, which raised two problems...

Sharing data or programs between multiple research centers (often universities) was complicated, requiring the sending of storage media or documents by mail, which considerably slowed down scientific research.

On the other hand, the threat of a nuclear attack loomed over the United States, and the need to find a solution to facilitate the dissemination of information and documents across the country became critical.

Arpanet

It was then that ARPA, the American government research agency, began research into the creation of a network that could solve the problems mentioned above, funded by the Department of Defense.

In collaboration with MIT, ARPANET was born as the first wide area network (WAN), and on October 29, 1969, the first test of sending a message between two machines located at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute was carried out.

That evening, the simple word "login" managed to travel a distance of more than 600km in a few minutes, or almost, because the last three letters of the word took more than an hour to arrive due to a bug in the central server, making "lo" the first message ever transmitted over the ancestor of the Internet.

Fun fact: the term "lo" in old English slang corresponds to an exclamation of surprise, an abbreviation of the word "look!", perfectly representing the engineers' surprise at that exact moment.

Later on, ARPANET was able to support features such as remote login, file transfer, and email, but it was also and above all the first packet-switching network.

What is packet switching?

Also called "packet-switching", it is a method of breaking down a complex piece of data into several "packets" of data, each containing a header and a payload.

The header allows the packet to be routed across the network to its recipient, so that the various "payloads" can be reassembled upon arrival to recreate the original complex data, and so that it can be processed by the application layer.

Two of the advantages of this method are error handling during transmission and the non-blocking nature of large data transfers:

• When a packet fails to reach its destination for any reason, only that packet needs to be resent by the sender, not the entire original data, thus saving bandwidth.
• If two files need to be sent, one of 2GB and the other of 100KB, the second file won't need to wait for the first to finish sending, it will simply be interspersed between the packets of the first!

The major technical implementation used for interconnected networks is called TCP/IP, and it is in particular its arrival that enabled the creation of the Internet network, whose expansion was facilitated by the standardization of TCP/IP.

If you want to find out how TCP/IP works, I invite you to read my dedicated article!

The Internet

Once standardized in 1982, the TCP/IP protocol allowed many networks to interconnect, including NSFNet (National Science Foundation Network), which gave researchers all over the world the ability to connect to one of the supercomputers in the United States.

The academic expansion of the Internet continued until 1989, the year the first public Internet Service Providers (ISPs) appeared in the USA and Australia.

In 1990, funding for ARPANET was stopped, giving way to the Internet, which continued on its path to become what we know today.