Internet n.The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in
1969 as the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed.
Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a
network architecture for military command-and-control that could survive
disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact,
ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical use
out of then-scarce large-computer resources.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to support
what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of
distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail
quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and
defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a
medium of communication between _humans_ and linked up in steadily
increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics,
techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this
lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The
typical machine/OS combination moved from DEC PDP-10s and PDP-20s,
running TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, to PDP-11s and VAXes and Suns running
Unix, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel microcomputers. The Internet's
protocols grew more capable, most notably in the move from NCP/IP to
TCP/IP in 1982 and the implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983.
It was around this time that people began referring to the collection of
interconnected networks with ARPANET at its core as "the Internet".
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines -
connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research
project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join
didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science Foundation built
NSFnet to open up access to its five regional supercomputing centers;
NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the original
ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990). Between 1990 and
late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major telecommunications
companies until the Internet backbone had gone completely commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered
the Internet. Once again, the killer app was not the anticipated one -
rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and
multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the Internet has
seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by
European telecoms monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into
itself many of the proprietary networks built during the second wave of
wide-area networking after 1980. By 1996 it had become a commonplace
even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet
would become the key unifying communications technology of the next
century. See also the network and Internet address.
