A brief history of the Internet

“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.” (Bill Gates)

The Internet in 2009 is diverse and complex. We rely on it as one of our primary tools of communication: for work, socialising, entertainment and administration. Nothing has had such an effect on society for a generation as the Internet.

But just 50 years ago the Internet was little more than a vague idea that only existed in the minds of select groups of scientists. In the 1950s computers could only work on one task at a time, in a process known as batch processing. Data processing and analysis was frustrating work, as was noted later:

‘An American professor had described how in the early day frustrated programmers had reacted [to computers]. So enraged were they at the curious results the machine produced that they relieved their feelings by kicking the computer casing. When there was danger of the whole thing being wrecked, a kicking board was placed as a guard. By inviting the programmers to kick this board, the computer itself was saved from destruction.’

On 4 October, 1957, a new urgency was added to the development of computers as networks. In a key moment in the Cold War, the Russians launched the first unmanned satellite, named Sputnik. The US reacted swiftly by establishing the Defence Advance Research Project in 1958.

The Defence Advance Research Project worked on major issues of US national security. They monitored the Russian Space programme, developed ballistic missile defences and detected nuclear tests. For their systems to work efficiently and at low-risk, they started to network computers.

Throughout the 1960s different networks were formed across the world. The most famous of these was ARPANET in the US, which became the world’s first packet switching network. In Britain the NPL network began to operate on a commercial footing, allowing non-government funded growth.

During the next two decades the number of different networks rose sharply. Technology became much more sophisticated and each of the separate networks became linked through a series of connections named gateways. As these different networks – in the US, France, the UK, Germany and so on – merged together throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a new word emerged: the Internet.
When ARPANET was switched off on 28 February in 1990, it didn’t matter. The modern Internet was already up and running.

The rest, as they say, is history.