This week we looked at the beginning of the internet and how it has developed throughout the years.


The internet was created the the United states in the 1950s. At first it was seen as a intelligence operation as the cold war was at its peak and there was a huge threat of nuclear war between the two power house countries. In the 50s computers were huge and extremely expensive and was used for military and scientist. To this day nobody knows who created the internet first, I was built by a number of scientists and engineers and has progressively became what we know today.

ARPANET

The man responsible for creating computer networks at ARPA was Lawrence Roberts. He was the first person to connect two computers together. The first packet-switching network was invented in 1969 when a fellow associate Leonard Kleinrock sent a message to another facility. This was the beginning of the ARPANET.

In 1974 a computer scientist called Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed a transmission-control protocol also known as TCP/IP its aim was to allow computers to speak the same language. It became a world wide network also known as the internet.

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First Email

As ARPANET grew they realised that sending messages between different systems could be ground breaking. A computer programmer from the USA Ray Tomlinson first invented the email. He used the idea of the ‘@’ symbol as a journey of a message. It was used as a informal way of communication at first, the largest mailing list was called SF-LOVERS. It transformed the network instead of focusing on serious military scientific topics email became a form of creating mutuals and having fun.

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Vannevar Bush

Vannevar wasn’t part of the scientists who created the internet. He wrote a essay in 1945 “As We Think” were he wrote about a machine that he named ‘Memex’ which purpose was to improve human memory by receiving information through the device. He changed the way American scientists studied and set up the building blocks for the internet. He died before he could see any of it become true but it doesn't make him any less important to the development of the wide web.

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Donald Davies

Donald Davies was a welsh computer scientist who invented the packet switching computer network. He created the ACE computer in 1950 and then made a mass produced system called DEUCE which became the most popular computer system in the 1950s.

The Browser Wars

Microsoft and Netscape has a battle between each other for power. Internet explorer was slow compared to Netscapes progressive navigation tools. Somehow Microsoft won the browser wars and internet explorer became the most popular web browser in the 1990s, I can clearly remember using IE in Primary school when we had to type out the whole domain to get a website to appear, I would’ve done anything to see a cat play a piano keyboard on youtube back then.

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Now Internet explore is a thing of the past as Google Chrome and Safari moved in. Someday in the nearer future the exact same thing will happen to them and a better, shinier new browser will take over.

Web standards

Web standards is the professional technical description of rules used to describe parts of the world wide web. Here are a few: