Publication | Open Access
A Brief History of the Internet
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1999
Year
EngineeringInternet ScienceIncomplete HistoryCommunicationPacket SwitchingGateway (Telecommunications)JournalismComputational Social ScienceInter-networkingAvailable Information InfrastructureInternet ComputingInternet ModelingInternet Of ThingsNext Generation InternetFuture InternetTechnologyNetwork ScienceSocial ComputingBrief HistoryArtsPhysical Internet
The Internet, emerging from telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer innovations, has become a worldwide broadcasting, information‑dissemination, and collaboration platform that transcends geographic boundaries. The authors provide a brief, cursory history of the Internet, focusing on four distinct aspects of its development. They describe three interrelated dimensions—technological evolution from packet switching to modern infrastructure, operational management of the global network, and the social community of Internauts—that underpin the Internet’s growth. The commercialization of the Internet has successfully translated research advances into a widely deployed, accessible information infrastructure.
The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location. In this paper, several of us involved in the development and evolution of the Internet share our views of its origins and history. This is intended to be a brief, necessarily cursory and incomplete history. This history revolves around four distinct aspects. There is the technological evolution that began with early research on packet switching and the ARPANET (and related technologies), and where current research continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as scale, performance, and higher level functionality. There is the operations and management aspect of a global and complex operational infrastructure. There is the social aspect, which resulted in a broad community of Internauts working together to create and evolve the technology. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting in an extremely effective transition of research results into a broadly deployed and available information infrastructure.