Origin of the Internet

Running Head : Origin of the Internet

Origin of the Internet

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The Internet as we know it originates from government-funded research into networking technologies with strategic applications . Journalist and erstwhile Internet historian David Hudson (14-16 ) observes that the ARPANET or Advanced Research Projects Agency Network formed the technical backbone of what would become the Internet . The ARPANET was a communications network in which each node had equal network privileges

The rationale behind this decentralized architecture was that regardless of which node on the network

would be destroyed , the network 's functionality would not be compromised . This is perhaps what distinguishes the Internet most from other communications technologies and is possible due to the development of packet switching and TCP /IP which enabled data to be sent discontinuously to circumvent the need for a dedicated data stream

However , it was not until the ARPANET was interlinked with the NSFNet in the mid-70s that the term Internet ' began to attain increasing currency among network professionals . Furthermore , the increasing adoption by other nations as well as universities and research institutions of TCP /IP permitted the expansion of the ARPANET 's fundamental architecture , effectively increasing the geographical coverage of the emerging network (National Science Foundation 10-12

What truly permitted the Internet to integrate itself into the lives of individuals beyond government and research was the rise of several applications and protocols that increased its `extracurricular potential , most notably hypertext . Hypertext within a computer networking context was developed by CERN...