Rise of the Internet

The popularity of the Internet has given rise to many claims on it. Everybody from browser companies to workstation vendors to router vendors lays claim to being the genesis of or the backbone of the Internet. Most agree, though, that the modern Internet was born in the late '60s under the name ARPANET. The ARPANET was a research tool for those doing work for the United States government under the direction of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The original contract was awarded to BBN of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

ARPANET traffic consisted of communications between universities and military and government laboratories. Researchers at disparate locations were able to exchange files and electronic messages with each other via ARPANET. As the network grew it split into two: MILNET, which was used for military use, and ARPANET (it retained the name), which continued to be used for experimental research. In the early '80s, a standard for ARPANET communications protocols, actually a suite of protocols, was specified. This was termed the TCP/IP protocol suite which eventually became just TCP/IP. It is the base of almost all network traffic today.

In 1987 the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded a network to connect the six supercomputer centers that were spread out nationwide. This network, called NSFnet, spanned the United States from San Diego, California on the west coast to Princeton, New Jersey on the east coast. The original NSFnet was over 56K leased lines, fast in those days but slow by today's standards, so NSF also solicited proposals to build a new high-speed network. The winning proposal was submitted by MCI, IBM, and MERIT (an organization which came out of a network at the University of Michigan), and the backbone of what we call the Internet was built.

Over the course of the '90s, the backbone of this network grew by the addition of different long-haul carriers providing leased line connections and local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) providing local access and short-haul connections. Today, through mutually beneficial service agreements, networks are connected with each side agreeing to carry the other's traffic on the condition that its traffic is also carried. This has created a worldwide network in which, for the price of the initial connection, access is provided to a virtually unlimited amount of resources spanning the entire globe.