1948
BBN was formed by Richard Bolt, Leo Beranek, and Robert Newman. This company
developed most of the hardware and software for and had the government contract for the
ARPANET. It was also called the "Third University", since it was in the
same town with MIT and Harvard.
1957
The Russians launched Sputnik. A shock wave went through the American government and
scientific community.
1958
ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and its subdivision, IPTO (Information
Processing Techniques Office), were created in the Department of Defense. Inside
this office were computers with telephone links to the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Strategic Air
Command in Santa Monica, California. They were not linked together and this seemed
to cause a problem.
1960's The
concept of forming a network of computers great distances apart and sharing
information from one computer user to another computer user was developed. They
started from scratch and came up with something that worked.
1969
ARPANET went on line. The first four nodes were at the University of California at
Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute in Stanford, California, the University of
California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The network control center
was at BBN in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The tech support was good enough that BBN
could pinpoint telephone line problems in the California telephone systems. A user
had to have a government research grant to get on line.
1972
The first email delivery engaging two different computers was set up by Ray
Tomlinson. He used two different pieces of software....SNDMSG and READMAIL. He
chose the @ sign in email addresses to mean "at the designated institution".
1980
The National Science Foundation funded CSNET, an independent net for college and
university computer science departments. It was funded for five years. This
was not connected to the ARPANET. Other similar nets were established in the 1980's
and a system of computers linked by backbone telephone, radio, and satellite links were
established. The nets were tied together at points called gateways.
1983
Domains came into being. Some of them were edu (university), gov (government), com
(company), org (nonprofit organization), and int (international treaty entity).
1985 - 1989 ARPANET was dismantled. Its backbone was
taken out of service and its nodes were connected to the Internet established by the
National Science Foundation.
1990
The www (world wide web) was established. it was developed at CERN Laboratory in
Geneva, Switzerland.
1991
The National Science Foundation lifted the restrictions against the commercial use of the
internet.
1993
Mosaic was developed at the University of Illinois. It was the forerunner of
Netscape and can be downloaded from a site on the Internet today. One of the
developers was Marc Andreessen.
Packet When
data is sent from one computer to another computer, the file is broken up into small
sections called packets.
Protocol This
came from the Greek word protokollon, which meant the first leaf of a
volume. It contained a synopsis of the manuscript, an authentication, and the
date. The internet uses protocols to send this type of information with packets so
that they can be put back together when they arrive at their destination.
Email This
was called network mail in the early years. The first email software was called
RSEXEC for resource-sharing executive.
IMP Interface
Message Processor These
were the first computers used to interface other computers with each other and were the
progenitors of the present day routers (the computers that get the packets where they are
supposed to go).
SMTP Simple
Mail Transfer Protocol
This is the protocol for sending email.
UNIX A
computer operating system developed at AT&T's Bell Labs in 1969
OSI Open
Systems Interconnection
It was supposed to be the official standard for the conduct of operations on the Internet.
However, few people used it.
TCP/IP
Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol
This is the protocol
that we use instead of OSI. The functions of TCP are (1) breaking up messages into
datagrams (packets) (2) reassembling them at the other end (3) detecting
errors (4) resending anything that got lost and (5) putting packets back in
the right order. IP is responsible for routing individual datagrams (packets).
That is why the computer techs send you to the control panel and ask you if you
have TCP/IP selected when you call in about Internet problems.
Ethernet
Short Distance (Local Area)
Network It was developed
by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
MAILBOX The
first program to store email on a server.
