Very few will doubt that the internet is, without a speck of doubt, one of the most common forms of the usage of the internet. More than half of the world’s population uses the internet. More specifically, out of eight people you see, research says that chances are that five of them will be users of the internet. And they are just not users who use the global network for a few seconds but actually for hours a day! Another measure of the usage of the internet can be the number of devices connected to the global network. According to Statista, there are approximately thirty-five billion devices connected to the network of networks. Putting things into context, that is more than four devices connected for each person residing on the crust of this pale blue dot we call the Earth! The increase in the usage of the internet can very well be attributed to the increase in its supply. Nowadays, there are seven thousand internet services operating just in the United States of America! You may ask what we mean by a single internet service? By that, we mean all the packages and plans offered by one provider, for example, Xfinity internet.
The bigger the role the internet plays in our lives, the more people have a say about it. While some people like to express their opinions on the negative and positive effects of different aspects of the internet on various segments of society, others like to discuss the variety of internet service providers available and decipher the best one out of them. Yet another section of the population spends their free time figuring out the history of the internet. If you belong to the latter subsection, keep reading this article because we will be elaborating on something that piques your interest consistently. In this piece, our focus will be to give you a timeline of the evolution of the internet.
ARPANET
The ARPANET is most commonly known as the predecessor of the internet and stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Just by its name, you can guess that it was formed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). If you were thinking that ARPA comes under some kind of department of technology, know that it was actually an agency of the United States Department of Defense. Yes, that is right, the military wanted to create a network that allowed for accessibility of data from multiple sites if the site that held the data previously was bombed by the Soviet Union.
Even though it was created to have the world be a better place, it ended up only damaging the global population. However, just because the ARPANET was created by the military did not mean that everything about its aims was also linked to defense. In fact, one of the aims was to help the formation of global communities. Don’t take our word for it; take the word of two of the scientists heavily involved in the development of ARPANET – Joseph Licklider and Robert Taylor. In works written by them such as “The Computer as a Communication Device,” they argue the case for the formation of global communities.
Internet Protocol
We are against crediting one person for the creation of the internet. However, if we were forced to put our finger on one, we believe it would be Vinton Cerf. We say this knowing a few things. We would choose him because he invented the platform that allowed computing devices to hold interactions in virtual spaces. This platform has come to be known as the Internet Protocol (IP). The day it was launched, Jan 1, 1983, is also known around the world as the birthday of the internet.
World Wide Web (WWW)
This is a term much more popular than the term “Internet Protocol.” The WWW came into being at the start of the last decade of the twentieth century. It has billions of web pages on it that all have information on them. The web pages can be connected to one another using HTML code allowing internet users to take in content in a much easier manner. The importance of the World Wide Web does not need to be elaborated as we all know how big of an impact it creates on our lives. We use it to open up our emails, watch movies, check scores, and listen to music among many other things.
Conclusion
We hope this article gave you insight into how the internet developed over the years.
