Information Technology

The Internet history

The Internet is a network of networks joining many computers together hence providing means for transportation of data and messages across distances and an infrastructure for the use of E-mail , bulletin boards archives , hypertext documents , databases and other resources (Roberts , 1967

The history of the internet began way back in 1973 when the U .S Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA ) initiated a research program to investigate the techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds . The main aim of the research was to develop communication

protocols which would allow computers that have been networked to communicate transparently across different multiple linked packet networks . This project was called Internetting and the system of networks which emerged from this research done was called the "Internet " Hence the protocols which were developed over this research project are known as the TCP /IP Protocol Suite that is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP ) and Internet Protocol (IP (Dingel , Dutta Odlyzko , and Sato , 2003

In 1980 to 1981 two other networking projects BITNET (Because It 's Time Network ) and CSNET were initiated . BITNET adopted the IBM RSCS protocol suite and featured a direct leased line connection between participating sites . The original BITNET connections linked IBM mainframes in university data centers and this rapidly changed as protocol implementations became available for other machines . BITNET has been multi disciplinary in nature with users in all academic areas that also provided a number of unique services to its users . BITNET has established a backbone which uses the TCP /IP protocols with RSCS-based applications running above TCP protocols

By 1985 , Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers , and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications . Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities , often with different systems , but interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications between people . The Internet technology was being experimentally validated and widely used among a subset of computer science researchers , other networks and networking technologies were being pursued . The usefulness of computer networking was demonstrated by DARPA and Department of Defense contractors (Licklider and Clark , 1962

With the exception of BITNET and USENET , these early networks were intended for closed communities of scholars and hence little pressure for the individual networks to be compatible . In addition there were alternate technologies were being pursued in the commercial sector including XNS from Xerox , DECNet , and IBM 's SNA . It remained for the UK 's National Research and Education Network called JANET and U .S NSFNET programs to explicitly announce their intent to serve the entire higher education community . In 1985 the NSFNET program was started to support wide area networking . The wide area networking infrastructure supports the general academic and research community with the need to develop a strategy that establish such infrastructure . CSNET (Computer Science Network ) was initially funded by the National Science Foundation to provide networking for...