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Dated: Aug. 13, 2004

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By Najmi

The Internet has revolutionized the computer andcommunications world like nothing before. Theinvention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, andcomputer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once aworld-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism forinformation dissemination, and a medium forcollaboration and interaction between individuals andtheir computers without regard for geographiclocation.

The Internet represents one of the most successfulexamples of the benefits of sustained investment andcommitment to research and development of informationinfrastructure. Beginning with the early research inpacket switching, the government, industry andacademia have been partners in evolving and deployingthis exciting new technology.

No one actually owns the Internet, and no singleperson or organization controls the Internet in itsentirety. More of a concept than an actual tangibleentity, the Internet relies on a physicalinfrastructure that connects networks to othernetworks. There are many organizations, corporations,governments, schools, private citizens and serviceproviders that all own pieces of the infrastructure,but there is no one body that owns it all. There are,however, organizations that oversee and standardizewhat happens on the Internet and assign IP addressesand domain names, such as the National ScienceFoundation, the Internet Engineering Task Force,ICANN, InterNIC and the Internet Architecture Board.

IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) is the mainstandards organization for the Internet. The IETF is alarge open international community of networkdesigners, operators, vendors, and researchersconcerned with the evolution of the Internetarchitecture and the smooth operation of the Internet.It is open to any interested individual.

The InterNIC is currently an informational Web siteestablished to provide the public with informationabout domain name registration.

ICANN shorts for Internet Corporation for AssignedNames and Numbers, a nonprofit organization that hasassumed the responsibility for IP address spaceallocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain namesystem management and root server system managementfunctions previously performed under U.S. Governmentcontract.

Internet Architecture Board is a technical advisorygroup of the Internet Society, whose responsibilitiesinclude:

Oversee the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Oversee the Internet standards process Publish and manage Request for Comments (RFCs)

InterNIC is responsible for assigning classes todifferent organizations according to their number ofhosts

A Brief History of the Internet

The U.S. Department of Defense laid the foundation ofthe Internet roughly 30 years ago with a networkcalled ARPANET. But the general public didn't use theInternet much until after the development of the WorldWide Web in the early 1990s. As recently as June 1993,there were only 130 Web sites. Now there are more then2 billion websites.

ARPANET was a large wide-area network created by theUnited States Defense Advanced Research Project Agency(ARPA). Established in 1969, ARPANET served as a testbed for new networking technologies, linking manyuniversities and research centers. The first two nodesthat formed the ARPANET were UCLA and the StanfordResearch Institute, followed shortly thereafter by theUniversity of Utah.

From ARPANET to Internet

In October 1972 ARPANET went 'public'. At the FirstInternational Conference on Computers andCommunication, held in Washington DC, ARPA scientistsdemonstrated the system in operation, linkingcomputers together from 40 different locations. Thisstimulated further research in scientific communitythroughout the Western World. Soon other networkswould appear. The Washington conference also set up anInternetworking Working Group (IWG) to coordinate theresearch taking place. Meanwhile ARPA scientistsworked on refining the system and expanding itscapabilities:

In 1972, they successfully employed a new program toallow the sending of messages over the net, allowingdirect person-to-person communication that we nowrefer to as e-mail. This development we will deal withat length in the next section.

Also in the early 70s, scientists developedhost-to-host protocols. Before then the system onlyallowed a 'remote terminal' to access the files ofeach separate host.

In 1974, ARPA scientists, working closely with expertsin Stanford, developed a common language that wouldallow different networks to communicate with eachother. This was known as a transmission controlprotocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP).

The development of TCP/IP marked a crucial stage innetworking development, and it is important to reflecton the implications inherent in the design concepts...since it could all have turned out very differently.Although 1974 marked the beginning of TCP/IP, it wouldtake several years of modification and redesign beforeit was competed and universally adopted.

Meanwhile computer networking developed apace. In 1974Stanford opened up Telnet, the first openly accessiblepublic 'packet data service' (a commercial version ofARPANET). In the 1970s the US Department of Energyestablished MFENet for researchers into MagneticFusion Energy, which spawned HEPNet devoted to HighEnergy Physics. This inspired NASA physicists toestablish SPAN for space physicists. In 1976 aUnix-to-Unix protocol was developed by AT&T Belllaboratories and was freely distributed to all UNIXcomputer users (since UNIX was the main operatingsystem employed by universities, this opened upnetworking to the broader academic community).

History of Usenet/Newsgroups

In 1979 Usenet was established, an open systemfocusing on e-mail communication and devoted to'newsgroups' is opened, and still thriving today.

Usenet came into being in late 1979, shortly after therelease of V7 Unix with UUCP. Two Duke University gradstudents in North Carolina, Tom Truscott and JimEllis, thought of hooking computers together toexchange information with the UNIX community. SteveBellovin, a grad student at the University of NorthCarolina, put together the first version of the newssoftware using shell scripts and installed it on thefirst two sites: unc and duke.

At the beginning of 1980 the network consisted of those two sites and PHS(another machine at Duke), and was described at theJanuary Usenet conference. Steve Bellovin laterrewrote the scripts into C programs, but they werenever released beyond unc and duke. Shortlythereafter, Steve Daniel did another implementation inC for public distribution. Tom Truscott made furthermodifications, and this became the "A" news release.

In 1981 at U. C. Berkeley, grad student Mark Hortonand high school student Matt Glickman rewrote the newssoftware to add functionality and to cope with theever increasing volume of news -- "A" News wasintended for only a few articles per group per day.This rewrite was the "B" News version. The firstpublic release was version 2.1 in 1982; the 1.*versions were all beta test. As the net grew, the newssoftware was expanded and modified. The last versionmaintained and released primarily by Mark was 2.10.1.

Rick Adams, at the Center for Seismic Studies, tookover coordination of the maintenance and enhancementof the B News software with the 2.10.2 release in1984. By this time, the increasing volume of news wasbecoming a concern, and the mechanism for moderatedgroups was added to the software at 2.10.2. Moderatedgroups were inspired by ARPA mailing lists andexperience with other bulletin board systems.

In March 1986 a package was released implementing newstransmission, posting, and reading using the NetworkNews Transfer Protocol (NNTP) (as specified in RFC977). This protocol allows hosts to exchange articlesvia TCP/IP connections rather than using thetraditional uucp. It also permits users to read andpost news (using a modified news user agent) frommachines which cannot or choose not to install theUSENET news software. Reading and posting are doneusing TCP/IP messages to a server host which does runthe USENET software. Sites which have manyworkstations like the Sun and SGI, and HP productsfind this a convenient way to allow workstation usersto read news without having to store articles on eachsystem. Many of the Usenet hosts that are also on theInternet exchange news articles using NNTP because theload impact of NNTP is much lower than uucp (and NNTPensures much faster propagation).

NNTP grew out of independent work in 1984-1985 byBrian Kantor at U. C. San Diego and Phil Lapsley at U.C. Berkeley. NNTP includes support for System V UNIXwith Excelan Ethernet cards and DECNET under Ultrix.NNTP was developed at U. C. Berkeley by Phil Lapsleywith help from Erik Fair, Steven Grady, and MikeMeyer, among others. The NNTP package was distributedon the 4.3BSD release tape (although that was version1.2a and out-of-date) and is also available from thevarious authors, many major hosts, and by anonymousFTP from lib.tmc.edu, mthvax.cs.miami.edu andftp.uu.net.

One new version of news, known as C News, wasdeveloped at the University of Toronto by GeoffCollyer and Henry Spencer. This version is a rewriteof the lowest levels of news to increase articleprocessing speed, decrease article expirationprocessing and improve the reliability of the newssystem through better locking, etc. The package wasreleased to the net in the autumn of 1987. For moreinformation, see the paper News Need Not Be Slow,published in the Winter 1987 Usenet TechnicalConference Proceedings. The most recent version of CNews is the 20 Feb 1993 "performance release." C Newscan be obtained from its official archive site,cs.toronto.edu, using FTP.

Another Usenet system, known as InterNetNews, or INN,was written by Rich Salz. INN is designed to run onUNIX hosts that have a socket interface. It isoptimized for larger hosts where most traffic usesNNTP, but it does provide full UUCP support. INN isvery fast, and since it integrates NNTP many peoplefind it easier to administer only one package. Thepackage was publicly released on August 20, 1992. Formore information, see the paper InterNetNews: UsenetTransport for Internet Sites published in the June1992 Usenet Technical Conference Proceedings. INN canbe obtained from many places; its official archivesite is ftp.uu.net in the directorynetworking/news/nntp/inn. The current version is1.4sec, last release 22 December 1993.

ANU-NEWS is news package written by Geoff Huston ofAustralia for VMS systems. ANU-NEWS is a complete newssystem that allows reading, posting, direct replies,moderated newsgroups, etc. in a fashion closelyrelated to regular news. The implementation includesthe RFC 1036 news propagation algorithms andintegrated use of the NNTP protocols to support remotenews servers, implemented as a VAX/VMS Decnet object.An RFC 977 server implemented as a Decnet object isalso included. ANU-NEWS currently includes support forthe TCP/IP protocols.The ANU-NEWS interface is similarto standard DEC screen oriented systems. The licensefor the software is free, and there are norestrictions on the re-distribution.

In 1981 Bitnet was developed City University New Yorkto link university scientists using IBM computers,regardless of discipline, in the Eastern US. CSNet,funded by the US national Science Foundation wasestablished to facilitate communication for ComputerScientists in universities, industry and government.In 1982 a European version of the Unix network, Eunet,was established, linking networks in the UK,Scandinavia and the Netherlands, followed in 1984 by aEuropean version of Bitnet, known as EARN (EuropeanAcademic and Research Network).

ARPANET is still the backbone to the entire system.When, in 1982 it finally adopts the TCP/IP theInternet is born... a connected set of networks usingthe TCP/IP standard.

From Internet to World Wide Web

One early, and essential development, was theintroduction in 1984 of Domain Name Servers (DNS).Until then each host computer had been assigned aname, and there was a single integrated list of namesand addresses that could easily be consulted. The newsystem introduced some tiring into US internetaddresses such as edu (educational), com.(commercial), gov (governmental) in addition to org.(international organization) and a series of countrycodes. This made the names of host computers easier toremember

A second development was the decision by nationalgovernments to encourage the use of the internetthroughout the higher educational system, regardlessof discipline. In 1984 the British governmentannounced the construction of JANET (Joint AcademicNetwork) to serve British universities, but moreimportant was the decision, the following year, of theUS National Science Foundation to establish NSFNet forthe same purpose the use of TCP/IP protocols wasmandatory for all participants in the program

NSFNet signed shared infrastructure 'no-metered-cost'agreements with other scientific networks (includingARPANET), which formed the model for all subsequentagreements.

Finally, NSFNet agreed to provide the 'backbone' forthe US Internet service, and provided five'supercomputers' to service the envisaged traffic. Thefirst computers provided a network capacity of 56,000bytes per second but the capacity was upgraded in 1988to 1,544,000,000 bytes per second.

The effect of the creation of NSFNet was dramatic. Inthe first place it broke the capacity bottleneck inthe system. Secondly, it encouraged a surge inInternet use. It had taken a decade for the number ofcomputer hosts attached to 'the Net' to top thethousand marks. By 1986 the number of hosts hadreached 5000 and a year later the figure had climbedto hosts 28,000.

Although commercial exploitation of the net hadstarted, the expansion of the Internet continued to bedriven by the government and academic communities. Itwas also becoming ever more international. By 1989 thenumber of hosts surpassed 100,000 for the first timeand had climbed to 300,000 a year later. The end ofthe 1980s and the start of the 1990s provide aconvenient cut-off point for several reasons:

In 1990 ARPANET (which had been stripped of itsmilitary research functions in 1983) became a victimof its own success. The network had been reduced to apale shadow of its former self and was wound up.

In 1990, the first Internet search-engine for findingand retrieving computer files, Archie, was developedat McGill University, Montreal. The development ofsearch-engines will be dealt with in the last lecture.

In 1991, the NSF removed its restriction on privateaccess to its backbone computers.

Information Superhighway

"Information superhighway" project came into being.This was the name given to popularize Al Gore's HighPerformance Computing Act which provided funds forfurther research into computing and improving theinfrastructure of the Internet's (US) structure. Itslargest provisions from 1992-96 were $1,500 millionsfor the NSF, $600 millions for NASA and $660 for theDepartment of Energy.

The Difference Between the Two

Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web interchangeably, but in fact the two terms are not synonymous. The Internet and the Web are two separatebut related things.

The Internet is a massive network of networks, anetworking infrastructure. It connects millions ofcomputers together globally, forming a network inwhich any computer can communicate with any othercomputer as long as they are both connected to theInternet. Information that travels over the Internetdoes so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way ofaccessing information over the medium of the Internet.It is an information-sharing model that is built ontop of the Internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol,only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, totransmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allowapplications to communicate in order to exchangebusiness logic, use the Web to share information. TheWeb also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Exploreror Netscape, to access Web documents called Web pagesthat are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Webdocuments also contain graphics, sounds, text andvideo.

The Web is just one of the ways that information canbe disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, notthe Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies onSMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP.So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit alarge portion, but the two terms are not synonymousand should not be confused.

History of World Wide Web

World Wide Wed was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee atEuropean Laboratory for Practical Physics (CERN) inGeneva, Switzerland in 1989. 1993 was the year ofMosaic, the first graphical Web browser. Mosaic wasdeveloped at National Center for SupercomputingApplications (NCSA) and the University of Illinois.The free distribution of Mosaic over Internet broughthuge public attentions to the World Wide Web.

In 1994, Marc Andreessen, one of the developers ofMosaic, left NCSA, co-founded Netscape CommunicationsCorp., released the Netscape Navigator, a graphicalWeb browser, in October 1994. The freely distributedNetscape Navigator for UNIX, Windows and Macintosh OSbrought the worldwide public interest to Internet andWeb. It marked the beginning of Internet business era.

In 1995, Microsoft stepped in the web browser market,released the Internet Explorer version 1.0.

From that time on, the Web browser war began. TheInternet gold rush began; the E-Commerce erabegan.......

Tim Berners-Lee: Father of the Web

The World Wide Web came into being in 1991, thanks todeveloper Tim Berners-Lee and others at the EuropeanLaboratory for Particle Physics, also known as ConseilEuropéenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN). TheCERN team created the protocol based on hypertext thatmakes it possible to connect content on the Web withhyperlinks. Berners-Lee now directs the World Wide WebConsortium (W3C), a group of industry and universityrepresentatives that oversees the standards of Webtechnology.

Early on, the Internet was limited to noncommercialuses because its backbone was provided largely by theNational Science Foundation, the National Aeronauticsand Space Administration, and the U.S. Department ofEnergy, and funding came from the government. But asindependent networks began to spring up, users couldaccess commercial Web sites without using thegovernment-funded network. By the end of 1992, thefirst commercial online service provider, Delphi,offered full Internet access to its subscribers, andseveral other providers followed.

In June 1993, the Web boasted just 130 sites. By ayear later, the number had risen to nearly 3,000. Asof April 1998, there were more than 2.2 million siteson the Web.

History of Email

Email is by far and away the most popular applicationon the internet. Just about everyone uses email, andgenerally people use it all of the time.

It all began in 1968 with a company called BoltBeranek and Newman (BBN). This firm was hired by theUnited States Defense Department to create somethingcalled the ARPANET, which later became the internet.ARPANET stands for Advanced Research Projects AgencyNetwork, and its purpose was to create a method thatmilitary and educational institutions couldcommunicate with each other.

In 1971, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson was assignedto a project called SNDMSG. This program was not new;in fact it had existed for a number of years. Bytoday's standards it was more than primitive. All itdid was allow users on the same machine to sendmessages to each other. Users could create text fileswhich would then be delivered to mailboxes on the samemachine.

A mailbox was simply a text file which could haveadditional text added to the end. Data could be added,but not deleted or changed. The name of the mailboxwas the name of the text file.

Ray was assigned to make this simple application do alittle bit more. As it turned out, he had been workingon something called CYPNET, which was intended totransfer files between computers within the ARPANET."The idea occurred to me that CYPNET could appendmaterial to a mailbox file as readily as SNDMSGcould," said Ray.

So he modified CYPNET to perform one additional task -to append to a file. This was pretty simple and thechange was quickly made.

After that, Ray made a decision which changed history.He created the format of the email address. He definedit as a mailbox name, the @ sign, and the machine'snode name. He used the @ sign because "it seemed tomake sense. I used the @ sign to indicate that theuser was 'at' some other host rather than beinglocal."

He sent himself a message, the contents of which havebeen lost in time. The first email message wasunceremoniously sent between two PDP-10 nodes of theARPANET network. History had been made.

Email usage grew quickly. In fact, a study two yearslater found that 75% of all ARPANET traffic was email.

One of the first big email programs available to thegeneral public (at least the first major one to catchon) is Eudora. This email client was first written in1988 by Steve Dorner. At the time he was an employeeat the University of Illinois.

Eudora was named for the now deceased Eudora Welty, anauthor from America. Eudora was the first email clientwhich provided a graphic interface. It was free whenit first came out; although once it was purchased byQualcomm in 1994 it became a professional product.

Like most applications on the web, Eudora was king fora few years, then quickly supplanted by the emailclients that came with Netscape and Internet Explorer.Both email clients became popular not because theywere better than Eudora, but because they wereprovided for free with the web browser.

According to a recent report by Forrester Research,more than half of all Americans use email for anaverage of half an hour each day. They claim a totalof 87 million Americans are active email users.

The History of the @ Sign

In 1972, Ray Tomlinson sent the first electronicmessage, now known as e-mail, using the @ symbol toindicate the location or institution of the e-mailrecipient. Tomlinson, using a Model 33 Teletypedevice, understood that he needed to use a symbol thatwould not appear in anyone's name so that there was noconfusion. The logical choice for Tomlinson was the"at sign," both because it was unlikely to appear inanyone's name and also because it represented the word"at," as in a particular user is sitting @ thisspecific computer.

However, before the symbol became a standard key ontypewriter keyboards in the 1880s and a standard onQWERTY keyboards in the 1940s, the @ sign had a longif somewhat sketchy history of use throughout theworld. Linguists are divided as to when the symbolfirst appeared. Some argue that the symbol dates backto the 6th or 7th centuries when Latin scribes adaptedthe symbol from the Latin word ad, meaning at, to ortoward. The scribes, in an attempt to simplify theamount of pen strokes they were using, created theligature (combination of two or more letters) byexaggerating the upstroke of the letter "d" andcurving it to the left over the "a."

Other linguists will argue that the @ sign is a morerecent development, appearing sometime in the 18thcentury as a symbol used in commerce to indicate priceper unit, as in 2 chickens @ 10 pence. While thesetheories are largely speculative, in 2000 GiorgioStabile, a professor of the history of science at LaSapienza University in Italy, discovered some original14th-century documents clearly marked with the @ signto indicate a measure of quantity - the amphora,meaning jar. The amphora was a standard-sized terracotta vessel used to carry wine and grain amongmerchants, and, according to Stabile, the use of the @symbol ( the upper-case "A" embellished in the typicalFlorentine script) in trade led to its contemporarymeaning of "at the price of."

While in the English language, @ is referred to as the"at sign," other countries have different names forthe symbol that is now so commonly used in e-mailtransmissions throughout the world. Many of thesecountries associate the symbol with either food oranimal names.

Now that you've gotten free know-how on this topic, try to grow your skills even faster with online video training. Then finally, put these skills to the test and make a name for yourself by offering these skills to others by becoming a freelancer. There are literally 2000+ new projects that are posted every single freakin' day, no lie!

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