There are a number of key milestone dates stemming from early thought papers to actual implementations, tests and deployments. Internet seems to be 36 years old! Still Internet is in its childhood, comparable to a 10 year old kid!
According to ComputerHistoryMuseum, Internet timeline starts in 1962 with research at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles).
In 1963, ASCII (American Standards Code for Information Interchange) standard developed.
In 1964, IBM's System 360 computers came to market. IBM came up with SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment) air travel reservation system for American Airlines, linking 2000 terminals in 60 cities via phone lines.
In 1965, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) unveils the PDP 8, the first commercially successful minicomputer.
In 1966, ARPA network project started to link its IPTOs (Information Processing Techniques Office) .
In 1967, the first ARPA researchers' conference held in in Ann Arbor, Michigan, came up with the concept of IMPs (Interface Message Processors). IMPs evolved into today’s routers.
In 1968, The ARPA team refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).
In 1969, four sites/nodes are selected for interconnecting. The first node on ARPANET at UCLA became operational on 2-Sep-69.
 Oct 29, 1969- the first 2 computers talked to each other over the network and Sept 2 was when the first computer talked to a router of the same year.
Some consider this as the birthday. Vint Cerf, father of the Internet was part of the UCLA team. On 7-Apr-69, a memo entitled Request for Comments is sent out. This is the first of thousands of RFCs that document the design of the ARPANET and the Internet.
The team was known as the Network Working Group and defined the first protocol – NCP (Network Control Protocol). The second site was setup at SRI (Stanford Research Institute). The first host-to-host connection, from UCLA to SRI, is made on October 29, 1969. The first log-in crashed the IMPs, but the next one worked! Many people consider this as the beginning of Internet.
If the defining moment is when the Internet became operational, it would have been during the first few months of 1983. January 1, 1983 was the target cutover date but it took a while longer in practice.”
15 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee publicly released his WWW project onto the Internet. Berners-Lee made available the first Web browser - "prototype (very alpha test) simple line mode browser" - and the first hypertext editor. For, you know, reading and writing on the Web.
On August 6, 1991, he [TBL] posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the
 Internet Pioneer Vint Cerf
|
debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. Mosaic browser came out in 1993.
As the encyclopedia states, this was the point when hypertext was married to the Internet. The original alt.hypertext posting is still available, thanks to Google Groups.
So get ready to celebrate the Internet's birthday on October 29th!
Father of the Internet
Vint Cerf is known as the Fathers of the Internet. Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn designed the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) and the architecture of the Internet. He is currently the vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since September 2005. He also serves as chairman of the board of the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Before joining Google, Cerf was working in DARPA (US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency) and MCI (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In MCI, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. |
