The dawn of the Internet age

BANGALORE, INDIA: Internet is the network through which all the computers in the world connect and transfer data to one another. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik and in retaliation, the US government began a campaign to overtake Soviets.

The outcome was ARPA or Advanced Research Projects Agency with the aim to connect mainframe computers at different universities around the country to be able to communicate using a common language and a common protocol.

Planned as a computer version of the nuclear bomb shelter, ARPANET, completed in 1969, protected the flow of information between military installations by creating a network of geographically separated computers that could exchange information via a newly developed protocol called NCP. ARPANET, started with the idea as a pioneer to packet switching network that gradually included packet satellite networks, ground-based packet radio networks and other networks.

First basic email program

The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the development of email through experimental inter-system email transfers that began shortly after 1969. Ray Tomlinson is hailed for sending the first email across a network, initiating the use of the "@" sign to separate the names of the user and the user's machine in 1971, when he sent a message from one DEC 10 computer (Digital Equipment Corporation) to another DEC 10. Tomlinson's work was quickly adopted across the ARPANET, which significantly increased the popularity of email. For many years, email was the killer app of the ARPANET and then the Internet.

TCP/IP is a set of network standards that specify the details of how computers communicate, as well as a set of conventions for interconnecting networks and routing traffic. The Transmission Control Protocol was first formally specified in December 1974 by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine. Early networking projects made it clear that to build a network of cooperating computers, a standard transmission protocol was necessary.

TCP was designed to be flexible enough to handle the physical differences in host computers, routers, and networks in general, but still provide a standard to allow these physically different entities to be able to transmit data amongst themselves.

World Wide Web

WWW was created in 1989 by English computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee to allow sharing of information between researchers in various parts of the world, working for CERN. It was further developed by the WWW Consortium based at MIT. The WWW project is based on the principle of universal readership that if information is available, then any approved person can access it from anywhere in the world. WWW's application follows a standard client-server model, where a user relies on a program (the client) to connect to a remote machine (the server) that stores data.

Users generally navigate through the WWW using an application known as a WWW browser client. The browser presents formatted text, images, sound, or other objects, such as hyperlinks, in the form of a WWW page on a computer screen. WWW pages are formatted using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and information is transferred among computers on the WWW using a set of rules known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Despite its immense popularity, WWW is not the only possible implementation of the hypertext concept. In fact, the theory behind the WWW was based on a more general project Xanadu, which was started by Ted Nelson in 1960 and was implemented in 1998.