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A Short History of the Internet
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Several inventions have transformed our world, our way of life and our working habits. The Internet is undoubtedly the one that has changed our lives the most.
The advent of the computer and the fax influenced the professional domain, but it did not have as major an impact on the rest of our daily activities as the Internet.
Today, electronic mail is the biggest competitor of the telephone; a majority of bank customers make their transactions over the Internet; even the smallest firms have a website. In as little as fifteen years, the Internet has become the starting point for research in a variety of areas.
Without intending to play historians, we have laid out the line of important events that mark the evolution of the Internet.
1. The prehistoric era (1950)
J.C.R. Licklider
J.C.R. Licklider is probably the man who conceived the idea of the Internet. By the end of the 1950s, Man-Computer Symbiosis had already alluded to the idea of a network linking up computers.
Practical application (1960)
J.C.R. Licklider was named the head of ARPA, an organization devoted to computer research for the American department of defense. He succeeded in linking three terminals installed in three different states.
The ARPANET (1969)
The big challenge was to link up all these small networks which started growing here and there. In 1969, thanks to the ARPANET project, four universities were linked up to one another. This rapidly growing interuniversity network regrouped 213 institutions of high knowledge in 1981. The Network was however used only by the Americans since the Europeans developed their own network: x.25.
Creation of the military version:
MILNET in 1975: the American army bought the ARPANET which then became the MILNET in 1983. At this stage, its use was restricted to the army, the government institutions and universities. Eventually another network called, NSFNet was also developed. Conceived to replace the ARPANET, however it used a completely new protocol called TCP/IP.
The birth of the Internet (TCP / IP):
The need to standardize the methods of communication between all existent networks led to the creation of the TCP/IP protocol of communication. All networks were hereafter able to communicate with each other. The idea of the Web as we know it today began to take form.
Network unification
With the arrival of the TCP/IP protocol, all networks, until then isolated, adopted the new protocol. Therefore, it was now possible to link up European and North American networks. At this point, we witnessed the development of Web applications, as well as the birth of electronic mail and FTP. The Internet however remained a tool without any commercial purpose. It was reserved for research and institutions. Technology was placed exclusively in the hands of universities and government agencies.
2. The Neolithic
The Democratization:
HTML, the Navigators Up until then, the Internet had very restricted functionalities, but the possibilities for technological innovation were present. The arrival of HTML and HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) made the Internet accessible to all thus increasing the democratization.
WWW is born (1991)
The creation of the World Wide Web comes to us from the European Tim Berners-Lee. He was the one who conceived the HTML and HTTP languages. He named the first Web navigator Nexus. He made it possible to visualize HTML pages. His plan was announced on August 6th, 1991, and the first servers arrived in 1992. 26 websites were listed. This was followed by the navigator Mosaic which rendered the websites accessible on most of the personal computers. The WWW took flight and the mad race began. Netscape navigator became the first ruler of the web.
3. The Ice Age
Birth of Google
In 1996, two students of Stanford laid the foundation for their search engine. It started storing data found on websites and it has not stopped since. More than 20 billion pages were counted at that point. Since then Google has given itself the mission to transform the World.
At the end of a dream
Nothing seems impossible on the Internet. One perceived the birth of the Amazon site, which became the biggest bookshop of the world. Several websites began selling almost anything that could be sold. Fortunes were created almost instantly. The campaigns of internet advertisements began, but they quickly deteriorated. This led to the invention of the term "Spam".
Collapse of the technology bubble
At the end of the year 2000, the techno bubble burst and dreams evaporated. Several big websites closed, erasing many fortunes. It is the end of recess for Amazon which must now become profitable, which will need about five years. eCommerce did not respond to the expectations of the investors. It is the failure of Telco with one of the most important failures of History, UUNET, and the problem of Nortel. Google becomes the supreme master of the Internet with the arrival of Google « I am lucky », what renders AltaVista practically invisible and moves Yahoo from the first to the second position on the ladder of the most important virtual firms.
4. The new epoch
The political chaos linked with September 11th, 2001 marked the revival of the Internet by placing it at the forefront of communication both for individuals, governments and firms. The concept of e-Government became popular and mass media adopted the Internet for further evolution. Social Internet came up in the form of BLOGS, websites such as Facebook and MySpace and social networks like LinkedIn. A significant portion of the contents on the web gets molded in the hands of the Web users. It's as if the readers wrote newspapers now.
5. And the future?
It is possible that firms such as Google, Facebook, and eBay become monsters due to the quantity of information on individuals which they withhold. This power will be able to surpass the Internet and affect the whole retail trade unless this industry appropriates certain virtual activities to insert the Internet into the entirety of its activities. The State being absent for regularizing the Web, we are at the mercy of the controllers of power and their influence on the Internet.
This power now belongs to virtual companies, but with the convergence of mass media, news, entertainment and communications (television, audio, phones) one ought to expect a displacement towards the big groups of this kind of industry.
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