THE HISTORY OF YHE INTERNET

The Internet was born in the sixties, as a result of the “Cold War” between the former Soviet Union and the US. At the time, the defense system of the US was built up on computers, which were interconnected. A nuclear attack on this central unit could bring the complete defense system of the US to a standstill.

If a nuclear bomb blew up one computer, another computer could instantly take over; thus, the computer network wouldn’t go down. So, the internet was created by the U.S. Department of defense in 1969 under the name ARPANet (ARPA was the department’s Advance Research Project Agency). It was built to serve two purposes;

·         To share research among military, industry, and university sources.

·         To provide a system for sustaining communication among military units in the event of nuclear attack.

At first each computer was physically linked by cable to the next computer, but this approach has obvious limitations, which led to the development of networks utilizing the telephone system. So the internet systems are based on the phoned systems , The internet traffic basically travels over phone lines. Because of this reason the internet and phone system are similar. The pictures and table help to understand showing the similarities:

After invention of the internet, other organizations, such as colleges and universities, home and office users started connecting their computers to this growing network to share information.

In 1972 – when the network included 23 computers – electronic mail, or e-mail, was developed. At the end of the 1970s, the discussion groups called newsgroups came into existence.