preview

The History of the Internet Essay

Good Essays

The History of the Internet

When one thinks of the internet, one may think of America Online, Yahoo!, or of Sandra Bullock being caught up in an espionage conspiracy. For me, it is a means of communication. A way to talk to some of my friends who live off in distant places such as Los Angeles, New Jersey, and the Philippines. The U.S. Defense Department originally had this intent in mind when they connected a computer network with various other radio and satellite networks.[1 Krol] They wanted a means of communicating within the U.S. military that could withstand partial outages, such a bomb attacks, and still function.[2 Krol]

In this paper I will cover the internet’s experimental beginnings, the commercialization of this …show more content…

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the governing body who takes care of operational and near-tearm technical problems of the internet.[7 ibid]

Along with all conveniences, there is a price to pay. Though information could be obtained from the internet for free, everyone has to pay for their own access to it.
Just like NSF pays for NSFNET and NASA pays for NASA Science Internet, individuals pay their Internet Service Provider and their telephone company for access to the internet.[8 ibid] As Ed Krol in said in The Whole Internet User’s Guide, ”everyone pays for their part.”

The internet, just like the light bulb and the airplane, started out as an idea. In August 1962, a researcher at MIT by the name of J.C.R. Licklider wrote a series of memos that outlined a “Galactic Network” of interconnected computers whereby everyone could quickly access information and programs from any site.[9 Leiner] Another researcher at
MIT, Leonard Kleinrock, published a paper in July 1961 that would make communication on the internet more feasible.[10 ibid] Kleinrock’s paper on the packet switching theory convinced MIT researcher Lawrence Roberts to set up an experiment that involved connecting a TX-2 computer at MIT to a AN/FSQ-32 computer at System Development Corp. at Santa Monica, California.[11 ibid] This experiment resulted in the first computer

Get Access