When the Internet appeared in its old form. Tim Berners-Lee - creator of the World Wide Web

We can name the creators of the steam engine, airplane or cinema. However, many brilliant scientists and teams from entire universities took part in the creation of the Internet. Technology developed quite slowly, so over the years, a variety of people contributed to the formation of the “global web.”

Like most other technologies that were advanced for its time, the Internet appeared as a military development. The first attempts to create wireless communications began at the height of the Cold War. The US leadership was concerned about the USSR's success in space exploration. According to a number of American military experts, space technology would make the Soviet Union absolutely invulnerable in the event of an armed conflict. Therefore, immediately after the successful launch of the Soviet Sputnik 1 in 1957, development of a new system for data transmission began in America. All research was conducted under the auspices of the US Department of Defense and was kept in the deepest confidence. The technical departments of the best universities in the country took part in the creation of the new technology.

In 1962, Joseph Licklider, an employee of the University of Massachusetts who also worked at the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense (ARPA), proposed his solution to the problem. Licklider believed that communication could be done through computers. Under his leadership, work began on a project called ARPANET in the 1960s. It was planned that messages in such a network would be transmitted in their entirety, but such transmission had several serious flaws: the impossibility of interaction between a large number of users, high cost, inefficient use of network bandwidth, and the inability to function normally if individual network components were destroyed.

A scientist from the University of California, Paul Baran, began working to eliminate these shortcomings. The result of his work was a new way of transmitting information - packet switching. In fact, each message was divided into several packets, each of which went to the recipient via its own channel. Thanks to this technical solution, the new data transmission network became virtually invulnerable.

At the end of 1969, a historical event took place - the first message was transmitted over ARPANET. The communication session was carried out between the University of California and Stanford University and was successful only on the second attempt. It took an hour and a half to transmit the short word “login” over a distance of 640 km. At that time, only 4 computers were connected to the network, located at different universities in America. By the early 1970s, e-mail was established, allowing the exchange of messages within the network. And at the same time, the Internet ceased to be an exclusively American system. Universities in Hawaii, Great Britain and Norway have joined the network. As the number of computers on the network grew, their interaction became increasingly slow and out of sync.

Another scientist who worked at ARPA, Winston Surf, took up the task of establishing the integration of computers into a single network. Surf developed two protocols:

• Transmission Control Protocol (TCP);
• and the optional Internet Protocol (IP).

Thanks to the joint work of the two protocols, it became possible to establish connections between many computers located around the world.

Internet before WWW

In the 1980s, ARPANET was already a fairly convenient tool through which universities, research laboratories and institutes could communicate with each other. In 1984, the domain name system came into being. Each of the computers included in the network was assigned its own domain name. Over time, this system changed: the domain became simply a component of many email addresses, and not the name of a specific device. For convenience, user and domain names are separated from each other by the @ symbol. Later, a new way of communicating online appeared: computer owners could not only send files to each other, but also communicate in real time in special chats.

In order to simplify the exchange of e-mail, the first corresponding program appeared in 1991. However, all this time the Internet remained only a set of channels for transferring data from one computer to another, and only leading scientists in Europe and the USA used it. A revolutionary decision that made the Internet available to all computer owners was the emergence and further development of the WWW system.

The emergence of WWW

In the early 1990s, English physicist and programmer Tim Berners-Lee began working on an open system that would allow various data to be posted online so that any user could have access to it. Initially, it was planned that this system would allow physicists to exchange the necessary information. This is how the well-known global network appeared - the World Wide Web (WWW). To place and search data on the digital network, it was necessary to create additional tools:

• HTTP data transfer protocol;
• HTML language, thanks to which it became possible to design websites;
• URIs and URLs that could be used to find and link to a specific page.

The world's first website was created in August 1991 by Berners-Lee himself. On the page with the address info.cern.ch, the creator of the global network described the new data placement system and the principles of its operation.

Netscape browser

Over the next five years after the creation of the WWW, 50 million users joined the network. To make Internet surfing easier, a browser was developed - Netscape, which already had the functions of scrolling and following hyperlinks. The first search engine was Aliweb, which was later replaced by Yahoo!. Since Internet speed was very slow, website creators could not use a large number of pictures and animations. The first sites were predominantly text-based and were quite inconvenient for users. For example, in order to follow a hyperlink, the user had to type on the keyboard the serial number of this hyperlink, indicated in square brackets.

In 1992, America passed a law allowing the use of the Internet for commercial purposes. After that, all large companies began to acquire their own websites. Pages appeared with the help of which one could reserve a table in a cafe, order food or buy some consumer goods. Many large magazines and newspapers began to post their issues on the Internet. To gain access to such an electronic publication, you had to buy a subscription.

A new milestone in the digital revolution was the emergence of social networks, which allowed people from all over the world to communicate.

In Russia, the introduction of Internet technologies began in 1990, and in 1994, domain.ru appeared. Initially, Russian sites, like American ones, were devoted primarily to advanced technological developments and news from the world of science. The very first domestic website was a catalog of English and Russian-language resources located at 1-9-9-4.ru.

The Internet has become so integral to the life of modern man that sometimes it is even difficult to imagine that it could not exist. It's even harder to imagine how we could get along without the Internet nowadays. Indeed, thanks to this invention, any boundaries and distances practically ceased to exist. On the Internet, everything is at arm's length. This is truly a worldwide phenomenon. Few people think about it or attach importance to it, but the history of the creation and development of this means of communication is quite interesting. But who invented the Internet? What sequence of events led to its appearance that gave rise to such an incredible increase in popularity?

At the beginning

If you try to look at the very origins, the history of the Internet goes back to the very first computer networks, which appeared in 1956. Naturally, almost every invention is preceded by a certain need. Even then, there was a need to combine computing technology in order to provide simplified data exchange and increase productivity.

In 1957, the US Department of Defense decided to begin developing reliable information transmission and communication systems in case any danger from the outside arose. DARPA (the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) proposed using computer networks in this capacity. All this became a big start for the entire information sphere. Of course, the Internet in the form in which we know it will appear much later.

The prototype of the Internet - ARPANET

It cannot be said that the creation of the Internet occurred overnight; rather, it was created in stages. The design and development of the network was entrusted to the four largest scientific institutions. These are the Universities of California at Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, the University of Utah and the Stanford Research Center. In 1969, they were united into a network called ARPANET.

The development was funded by the US Department of Defense. Subsequently, other research centers and scientific institutions joined the network. Many expressed a desire to take part in the work to build and improve the technology. The installation of the first server took place on September 2, 1969. A computer called Honeywell DP-516 had an insignificant, by today's standards, amount of RAM - 24 kilobytes.

By the way, there is another person who can be considered the forefather of the Network. This is Joseph Licklider. He was one of the first active promoters of the creation of global networks. If you ask the question of who invented the Internet, then part of the credit definitely belongs to him. He published his ideas, which are very close in meaning to the Internet that we see now, back in 1960 in the article “Symbiosis of man and computer.”

Birthday

We have come to the main question. Namely, in what year was the Internet invented? So, on October 29, 1969, a significant event occurred. Charlie Cline, who was in Los Angeles, was attempting to establish a remote connection to a computer at Stanford, 640 kilometers away. There, the reception of transmitted symbols was controlled by Bill Duvall, confirming successes by telephone. It was planned to send the LOGIN login command, but on the first attempt only two characters were sent - LO, after which the Network went down. Operations were quickly resumed, and the transfer was successfully completed around 10:30 p.m. We can say that the Internet actually began from this date.

Further development

When the performance of the new technology was experimentally tested, the systematic development of accompanying software began. 1971 is the year the first email client was born. Of course, it was far from the software that is available now, but it quickly gained popularity.

Already in 1973, the Network began to acquire an international image, as organizations from another continent, namely Europe, were joined. The first countries were Great Britain and Norway. The connection was made via the transatlantic telephone trunk.

In general, in the 1970s, the main services that were available and used on the Internet were e-mail, news, and message boards. Even then, even mailing lists appeared, although there was no spam then, everything was just to the point. Spam appeared a little later.

Network Engineering

To make using the Internet as simple and intuitive as it is now, there was still a lot of work to be done. In particular, at that time there was no interaction with other computer networks that were built according to other standards. The creators, engineers and programmers were faced with a difficult and interesting task: it was necessary to develop a protocol that would standardize and make possible the joint operation of diverse networks.

Jon Postel played a huge role in resolving this issue. It was he who came up with the concept of the TCP/IP protocol (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which replaced the previously used NCP. It is with the help of TCP/IP that networks are combined (or merged, superimposed). The Protocol was adopted in 1983 (later, however, it was repeatedly amended and improved). So among the names of those who invented the Internet or made a significant contribution to it, his name can definitely stand.

At the same time, the ARPANET increasingly began to be called the “Internet.” By the way, this name itself is an abbreviation for INTERconnected NETworks, which means “united networks.”

And in 1984, we completed development and implemented a domain name system. Scientific name - Domain Name Server, DNS. Thanks to this, you now write website addresses in letters. If there were no DNS, you would have to write sets of numbers - IP addresses.

Well-known chats - real-time communication - work using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) technology, which was created in 1988.

Another predecessor

In fact, the history of the Internet is very rich in many people, factors, backgrounds and coincidences. You could easily write a whole book. But we will focus on the most basic events. In 1984, the US National Science Foundation launched a large inter-university network - NFCnet, which became a serious competitor to ARPANET. It united several small networks, had greater bandwidth, and in the first year about 10,000 computers connected to it.

The key point was that NFCnet used the principle of “backbone networks”, which ensures high stability, speed and reliability. This feature was a major breakthrough, outlining the contours of the technologies that exist today.

However, core networks did not become the final stage of development. In 1993, they were replaced by even more advanced NAPs or, more simply put, access points. This opened up the possibility of interaction between commercial networks, which further significantly expanded the boundaries of the use of the Internet.

The technical background is, perhaps, a symbiosis of ARPANET and NFCnet.

World Wide Web, or the well-known WWW

Few people know, but the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN, the same one that scared us with the launch of the Large Hadron Collider) played a big role in making the Internet so popular among ordinary users. Or rather, a scientist from Great Britain, Tim Berners-Lee, who worked there. It was he who came up with the concept that later became the World Wide Web.

Over the course of two years, he developed HTTP, a system of URI identifiers, and HTML. The latter is a programming language using hypertext markup. To make it clearer how huge this contribution is, it is worth saying that almost all sites are written in HTML (all other options appeared much later). HTTP technology allows users to access the vast majority of Internet resources, and URLs (a subtype of URI) are the names that we see in the address bar of a web browser.

So, what we constantly use when browsing websites is the Web. And the Internet is a network through which information and servers are accessed. Nowadays, the Internet is identified directly with the Web, although they are not the same thing.

Some more facts

In 1990, the maintenance and operation of the ARPANET network was discontinued due to the no longer needed for it. We can say that the final transition to the Internet has taken place. At the same time, the first connection to the network was made using a telephone line.

The World Wide Web became publicly available in 1991. And the very first web browser, called NCSA Mosaic, was developed by Marc Anderssen in 1993. Perhaps it was Mosaic, together with HTTP, that ensured such a rapid spread of the Internet and its incredible popularity. The first - thanks to a clear and thoughtful user interface, and the second - because it provided all the necessary communications and made it possible to develop content. Now it was truly the Internet information network.

Later, data exchange began to be handled by providers, instead of university and other supercomputers. The World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, was organized. And already in 1995, WWW overtook all other protocols in terms of the volume of information transmitted.

Rapid growth

In the 90s, the Internet united almost all disparate networks and grew significantly in all respects. These are hardware and software, the number of sites and other information, access speed and stability. But the main growth is the number of users. Over the 5 years of its existence, the audience has already reached more than 50 million users. By comparison, it took television 13 years to reach the same numbers. Today, more than two billion people are connected to the network, and this figure is growing steadily.

A wide variety of services have appeared, such as video streaming, cloud data storage, social networks, forums, blogs and much more. Data transfer occurs at high speeds and in enormous volumes. Hundreds of petabytes of information flow through the network every day. In general, it is now difficult to imagine the life of a modern person without the World Wide Web. Nowadays, access can be obtained via satellite, mobile communications, cable and fiber optic lines, from almost anywhere on Earth. The Internet has become an integral part of our existence.

Conclusion

There are too many key people in the history of the creation and development of global networks to make it possible to unambiguously answer the question of who invented the Internet. This did not happen overnight, but many talented specialists worked on it.

The advent of the Internet was not a whim or an experiment; it was due to many factors that made it simply inevitable. We can only give credit to all the above-mentioned people for the fact that we have at our disposal such an irreplaceable thing as the Internet.

The Internet was born as a result of the confrontation between the USSR and the USA. In America they believed that the USSR was about to attack them, and then back in 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik. Quite a disaster! And they decided in the States that in case of war, it was imperative to have some kind of uninterrupted communication system for early warning of a missile attack. Work on a new communication system called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was entrusted to several universities.

First steps

The first real result was obtained in 1969, on October 29. It was on this day at 9 pm that the first successful attempt at communication between the universities at Stanford and Los Angeles was made. Operator Charlie Cline in Los Angeles managed to connect to the Stanford computer and transmit the code word.

October 1969.

The first email program appeared in 1971 and immediately gained popularity in the United States.

In the 70s, mainly mail was transmitted over the network, and there were bulletin boards. At that time, several disparate networks were already operating in the world, each working according to its own protocol. The question arose about unifying the data transfer process. Work in this direction began in 1973. Project leader Robert Kahn unveiled several principles by which the overall network should work:

• Internet connection should not lead to internal alterations;
• if the information does not reach the addressee, it must be transmitted again;
• simple gateways and routers should be used for connection;
• There is no general network management system.

Robert Kahn.

During the work on creating a common network, the TCP/IP protocol (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) was developed. These principles and protocol for the operation of the network are still in effect today. The transition of all computers on the ARPANET network to the TCP/IP protocol occurred in 1983. Then, for the first time, the ARPANET network was called the Internet.

However, in 1984, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) founded a new inter-university network, NSFNet (English National Science Foundation Network), created from several smaller ones. As NSFNet's audience grew faster than ARPANET, the name Internet passed on to it. This year was also marked by the emergence of the Domain Name System, DNS.

Internet in the USSR

The first transatlantic cable of the ARPANET network from the USA to Europe was laid in 1973, connecting England, Sweden and several other countries. The USSR was late, as usual, by a decade. The first Soviet computers connected to European networks in 1982. Then employees of the All-Union Research Institute of Applied Automated Systems established a permanent communication channel with the Vienna Institute of Systems Analysis.

It was a purely scientific channel. From there, the network of the Academy of Sciences began to form. It was not publicly available. Only scientific workers could connect to it, but Western scientific libraries with dissertations, monographs, etc. became available to them. In 1989 in the USSR, employees of the Kurchatov Institute and the Ministry of Automotive Industry began to create local networks and help other citizens connect to them.

Only when cooperatives were allowed did the Relcom network from the Demos cooperative appear, but this happened already in 1990. In the same year, the SU domain belonging to the Soviet Union was registered. The process of commercialization of the network has begun. By the way, before the collapse of the USSR, commercial conferences helped stabilize prices, since they were a direct source of information about where things cost. Unfortunately, these same networks played a significant role in the brain drain.

In August 1991, the Soviet Internet was one of the few channels that transmitted all the news in real time, including what Muscovites saw with their own eyes from their apartment windows. These days, a huge number of servers throughout the USSR connected to Relcom.

The period of formation of the World Wide Web

Popular in the 90s, the Mosaic web browser was developed in 1993 by the NCSA.

Since 1995, network providers began routing network traffic, thus freeing up university NSFNet supercomputers for scientific work. At the same time, the World Wide Web Consortium W3C was created to streamline web standards. Since 1996, the WWW protocol has overtaken FTP in traffic.

The combination of the http web protocol and the Mosaic web browser contributed to the growth of the Internet's popularity. Two years after the appearance of the browser, the Internet became known throughout the world. During these years, most of the separately existing networks merged with the Internet, and those that proudly remained on the sidelines, like Fidonet, gradually faded away.

In 1994, the SU domain stopped registering new users, as Russia received the RU domain. The SU domain was recommended to be slowly phased out and eliminated. However, despite the termination of registration and recommendations to “liquidate”, the domain continued to exist semi-legally and slowly develop until, finally, in the 2000s its activities were completely legalized.

By 1997, about 10 million computers were connected to the Internet around the world, and more than 1 million domain names were registered. Since that time, the Internet began to turn into one of the most popular sources of information and gradually acquired a modern appearance.

In Russia, by 1997, the first online newspapers had already appeared, the search engine Yandex.ru had appeared, and hackers began to operate. True, the entire Russian Internet, or Runet, as it came to be called, could easily fit on one hard drive of a modern computer. Search engines needed to find at least some information upon request, therefore, any well-written article automatically fell into the TOP of results. Golden times!

The current state of the World Wide Web

In 1998, the Pope sanctioned World Internet Day. The official patron saint has not yet been announced, but by default it is considered to be Isidore of Seville, the Spanish bishop of the 6th-7th centuries, the first encyclopedist, and this significant holiday is celebrated on April 4, the day of the ascension of Isidore.

True, each country has designated its own Internet Day. In Russia there are already two such days. The birthday of Runet is celebrated on April 7th. But the Moscow company IT Infoart Stars sent out letters to users with two sentences:

• consider September 30 as International Internet Day and celebrate it annually;
• conduct an all-Russian census of the Internet population.

In recent years, the Internet has spread very actively in Russia, surpassing everyone else in this indicator. True, we are now being pushed aside by China, where the Internet is spreading even faster.

But this is not surprising. For example, in Moscow broadband Internet is available to almost everyone, i.e. the market has reached saturation. There is a reserve only in the rest of Russia: there, half of the households still live without the Internet. But many are switching to mobile devices. We have three domains at our disposal: .su, .ru and .рф

Statistics say that, for example, in 2009, the Internet contributed 1.6% ($19.3 billion) to Russia’s GDP, approximately the same as Spain or Italy (in percentage terms). According to forecasts, in 2015 the contribution of the network economy to Russia's GDP should reach 3.7%.

The Internet today has firmly entered our lives. But few people know the name Tim Berners Lee. Meanwhile, this is exactly the person who created the Internet - the World Wide Web, without which many cannot even imagine their lives.

Timothy's biography is quite simple: he was born in 1955, in the month of June, on the 8th. His homeland is London. Tim's parents were mathematician-programmers Conway Berners-Lee (father) and Mary Lee Woods (mother). Both parents worked at the same university (Manchester) to create an electronic computer with random access memory - the Manchester Mark I.

It goes without saying that little Tim, seeing the adults doing things, played, constructing small computer models from empty boxes. Yes, and Tim drew mainly on computer punched cards - sort of cardboard with holes, the first storage media.

Years of study

Tim Berners studied at the prestigious Emanuel School, where his passion for design and mathematics, his success in studying, surprised everyone. His biography has the following entry: “Years of study at school – 1969-1973”

However, after graduating from school in 1973, upon entering King's College at the University of Oxford, Tim Berners decided to become a physicist.

And here Tim Berners-Lee’s childhood craving for computers awoke again - an interesting fact appears in the biography of the future discoverer of the Internet. Taking a Motorola M6800 processor and a regular TV, Tim managed to solder them into his first computer.

Like the biography of any mischievous boy, the biography of Timothy John Berners-Lee has fascinating pages that reveal the personality from a not entirely attractive side. Actually, it was reckless to condemn the young man for hacking the university computer database - this was just a fact of curiosity and testing his strength. But as a result, Tim received a stern warning from the rector and a ban on using a computer at the university.

Job

In 1976, Timothy Berners-Lee graduated from Oxford University with honors and received a bachelor's degree in physics. Having moved to Dorset, the future creator of the Internet gets a job at the Plessey corporation. Here Tim Berners is programming systems for information transmission, transaction distribution and creating barcode technology.

In 1978, Timothy John Berners-Lee changed jobs. At D.G Nash Ltd, his responsibilities are also changing: Tim Berners now creates programs for printers and multitasking systems.

Tim Berners-Lee was invited to Switzerland in 1980, where the future creator of the Internet works as a software consultant at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It is in Switzerland that Tim Berners, after work, begins to work on the Enquire program - the basis of the World Wide Web.

In 1981, Tim Berners-Lee joined Image Computer Systems Ltd, where he successfully worked on graphics and communications software and real-time systems architecture. Later, in 1984, the future creator of the Internet began to develop a real-time system that was designed to collect scientific information. In parallel, Tim Berners-Lee develops computer technology applications that accelerate particles, as well as other scientific equipment.

When asked what year the World Wide Web was created, the answer can be 1989. It was then that Tim Berners-Lee proposed to his management the idea of ​​the World Wide Web, which was based on the Enquire concept. This was the beginning of the invention of the Internet. He came up with the name “World Wide Web” himself, based on linking a variety of hypertext web pages using hyperlinks and a data transfer protocol. Previously, these protocols were used in the US military ARPANET network. This, as well as the university network protocol NSFNET, became the predecessors of the World Wide Web, thanks to which the Internet appeared.

And now the speech of the one who created the Internet in the video (in English, but with subtitles):

Birth of the World Wide Web

In the wonderful year of 1989, the protocol received a new field of activity: it began to be used for exchanging mail and real-time communication, for commercial purposes and reading newsgroups. The idea, which was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, was accepted by director Mike Sandell. But Tim Berners did not receive large funds for his work, only an offer to conduct experiments on one of the NeXT personal computers.

Despite the difficulties, Tim Berners successfully copes with the task set for himself: he develops the first ever web server and the first web browser. The WorldWideWeb page editor, a standardized way of writing website addresses on the Internet, the HTML language and the application layer data transfer protocol owe their appearance to his talent as a developer.

The following year, Tim Berners-Lee received an assistant - Belgian Robert Caillot. Thanks to him, the Internet project received funding. Robert also took upon himself all organizational issues. Despite his active participation in the development and promotion of the project, the main creator of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, whose name is revered by all programmers in the world, went down in history. Robert Caillot did not reserve the right to charge fees for the use of the invention and was undeservedly forgotten.

Later, in 1993, Tim Berners-Lee created several browsers for different operating systems, which increased the share of the World Wide Web (WWW) in total Internet traffic.

An interesting fact is that the University of Minnesota previously developed the Gopher protocol, which could well become an alternative to the modern Internet. But Tim Berners-Lee disputes this fact, putting forward the opinion that that protocol would not have withstood competition with the World Wide Web (WWW) due to the fact that the creators of this project demanded a fee for its implementation.

The idea of ​​creating an information network between computers was first expressed in 1960 by Joseph Likelider, head of the computer department of the US Department of Homeland Security. In 1962, he and colleague Welden Clark published the first scientific paper on online communication.

6 years after the idea was voiced, the first practical developments began. The predecessor of the Internet was the ARPANET project. It was developed on the basis of laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Berkeley. In 1969, the first data packet was sent over the ARPANET.

Using the first communication channel, only small text messages could be sent, since the computer power was low.

The network developed gradually. By 1981, more than 200 computers were connected to it, mainly belonging to scientific institutes and laboratories. Since the seventies, the development of special software for remote computer communication began. One of the first such programs was written by Steve Crocker. ARPANET existed autonomously until 1983, after which this network was connected to the TCP/IP protocol and became part of the future global Internet.

Along with ARPANET, other local network projects appeared. In France, the information and scientific network CYCLADES was developed, launched in 1973. Somewhat later, Fidonet appeared - the first network that became truly popular among amateur users.

TCP/IP protocol and creation of a global network

Those who tried to create local networks eventually faced the issue of incompatibility of data transfer protocols. This problem was solved at the Stanford Research Institute, where the TCP/IP protocol was developed in 1978. By the mid-eighties, this protocol had supplanted all others within the ARPANET network.

The name of the Internet itself appeared in the seventies in connection with the development of the TCP/IP protocol.

In the second half of the eighties, the consolidation of local networks continued. The local networks of NASA and other American government organizations switched to the TCP/IP protocol. European scientific institutes also began to connect to the common network. At the end of the eighties, it was the turn of the countries of Asia and the states of the socialist bloc - the first network to spread widely in the USSR was Fidonet, but over time the Internet began to play an increasingly significant role.

Since the nineties, the Internet has ceased to be exclusively a tool of scientists and government organizations - the number of amateur users began to grow, which continues to this day.