History of the Internet

"Internet no.1" - The telegraph system, 1843 onwards

19th century electric telegraph (morse code-type communication on copper wires). First ever global communications network.

See book: The Victorian Internet (and here), Tom Standage, 1998.


  1. First proper line: Paddington to Slough 1843.
  2. Washington to Baltimore 1844.
  3. First submarine cable: England linked to France 1845 (working properly from 1851).
  4. England linked to Ireland 1853.
  5. Telegraph used in Crimean War 1854.
  6. Atlantic cable laid 1858 (working properly from 1865). See here.

"Internet no.2" - The telephone system, 1876 onwards

Long-distance real-time audio. On copper wires.

The telephone system:
When the telephone system started in 1876, it was like (a). Each phone needs link to each other.
Soon replaced by (b). Switching office sets up temporary circuit between caller and callee for a call.
Switching office can only cover limited number of local phones. To make long-distance calls (between phones served by different switching offices), model in (c). 2nd level switching office. Eventually 5 levels.



Irish business letterhead from 1898, showing both telegraph and telephone contacts.

"Internet no.3" - The Internet, 1969 onwards

The Internet has been running since 1969 (Arpanet).

1.5.1 Internet

(a) Phone network. Failure (or destruction) of a few key nodes can fragment network into a number of isolated islands.
(b) Proposed distributed network, Paul Baran, 1960. Each node also acts as a router.

Origins: A network that can survive nuclear war

Myth: The Internet grew out of the military's nuclear war communications network.

Truth: What happened was there were military-inspired studies in the early 1960s of how to built a robust network that could survive attack - notably first-strike nuclear attack. The answer is to decentralise everything, including addressing and routing, to have no essential HQ, and also to have redundant paths.

Major US academic research centres (including military research bases with links to academia) took this idea in the late 1960s and built the Arpanet network that eventually evolved into the Internet. It was full of scientists and university academics from the start.

Growth of Arpanet from (a) 1969 to (e) 1972.

Applications

The Internet was originally set up not for email, not for sharing papers, documents or programs, not really for user communication at all in fact, but rather to allow sharing of expensive hardware (run programs remotely on someone else's expensive federally-funded computer).

Email was a surprise when it took off on Arpanet in the early 1970s.
Later, email discussion lists started, and the usenet decentralised discussion-group system, 1979.

File sharing would be done between sites when they worked together on a project. Later came the concept of a permanent archive of files that anyone on the network could access at any time. Archives of programs were set up, and later archives of documents of all sorts. It was not until the mid-1980s that it became clear that an embryonic electronic "library" of documents was starting to be built up online. Now, of course, the library has billions of documents.

Internet had steady growth and usefulness through 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, but did not really take off until Web idea invented.

As late as 1993, there was (almost) no business and (almost) no home civilian users on the Internet. It was still dominated by the academic, scientific, non-commercial users that had always dominated it. But the infrastructure was in place for an explosion in both business and civilian use.

NSFNET backbone in 1988.

The killer app - Mosaic web browser, 1993

Web invented as a system running on the Internet 1989 (Tim Berners-Lee, CERN),
but did not take off until had a mouse-driven interface - Mosaic, 1993 (Marc Andreessen, NCSA).
Web explodes. Internet explodes.

The modern Internet

"Server" = Single computer or Multiple computers

A "server" originally meant a single computer. It still does, for small sites.

But for large sites the "server" is actually a gateway to many (maybe thousands of) computers.
Examples:

Server farm.
Front end routes HTTP requests to different nodes.
Each node is a powerful server with a full copy of the website.