Internet and World Wide Web

Internet and World Wide Web. As early as 1962, John Licklider, computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed an Internet‐like system called the “Galactic Network” that would link computers around the world and be accessible to everyone. It was not Licklider's vision, however, but the desire of government officials and the military for a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack that prompted the first practical steps toward what would become the Internet. In December 1969, with funding from the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), scientists in California and Utah linked computers in four cities with dedicated, high‐speed transmission lines to create the ARPANET. Information passed from site to site in such a way that if some of the sites or the connections between them stopped functioning, the rest of the network would be unaffected.

More and more sites, mainly universities and government laboratories, joined the ARPANET throughout the 1970s, attracted in large part by the ability it gave individuals to exchange electronic messages, or e‐mail. By 1980, a number of networks were in operation, but because they relied on different information‐passing rules, or protocols, they could not communicate with one another. That problem was solved by Robert Kahn of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts, consulting company, and Vinton Cerf at Stanford University, who invented TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), a method of exchanging information among networks; by 1983 the various networks had linked up. The Internet was born.

For most of the 1980s, the Internet remained accessible only to computer professionals and those willing to learn the complex commands necessary to traverse it. But in 1989 the British scientist Tim Berners‐Lee at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics, devised a new protocol for passing information around the Internet. The resulting virtual‐information space, dubbed the World Wide Web by Berners‐Lee, allowed users to move from site to site on the Internet and view whatever information they wished without paying attention to the physical location of the computers holding that information.

The Internet was opened to commercial use in the early 1990s, and companies began selling access to it and creating software programs tailored to nonscientists. By the end of the decade, the Internet and the World Wide Web had become ubiquitous in the developed world and were spreading into developing countries.

As the twenty‐first century dawned, the Internet promised to reshape society in many ways. A rapidly increasing volume of commerce was being conducted over it, from retail sales and auctions to business‐contract negotiations. For many people, e‐mail had replaced letters and the telephone for much of their communication with friends and colleagues. Discussion groups that met in electronic “chat rooms” had created new communities of people who might never meet but who shared common interests and bonds. Most significant, the Internet had broadened and quickened the dissemination of information more than anything since the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century, leading to predictions that it could be the most important technological advance in five hundred years.

Bibliography

Katie Hafner and and Matthew Lyons , Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, 1996.
David Barney , Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology, 2000.

Robert Pool