Entry 1 : How much do you know about the history of internet?

In the 21st century, internet has become a vital part of our life. The Internet is used for research, chatting, emailing, staying in touch with friends, taking high school or college classes, and social networking. The April 2010 rankings performed by the Nielsen Company revealed that 82 percent of users utilize Google; 62 percent use MSN Live, Bing or WindowsLive; 54 percent use Facebook; and 53 percent use Yahoo. Without the internet, our lives will be boring and dull.

You probably use the internet everyday but how well do you actually know about the history of internet? Well, curiosity kills the cat and I have decided to google about the history of internet.

Let me now bring you 12 fast and interesting facts about the history of internet:

1. Where did the idea of internet came from?

The idea of the Internet began in 1962 with J.C.R. Licklider. He had visions of an Intergalactic Network where everyone could exchange information, research data and utilize programs through interconnections across the world.

2. Who is J.C.R Licklider?

Licklider is often referred to as the father of the Internet because his ideas of interactive computing

and a "Galactic Network" were the seeds for the Internet. His ideas was further developed in Defense

Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1962.

3. Who came up with the packet switching theory?

Leonard Kleinrock of MIT came up with the theory of packet switching. This theory was further developed by UCLA and this formed the basis of internet connection.

4. Have you heard of ARPANeT?

The first model of the Internet was dubbed the ARPANeT. It stands for 'Advanced Research Projects Agency Network'. This came about in the arena of Sputnik and the cold war. The military needed a method of communicating and sharing all the information on computers for research and development. It would also be a handy communication system if all traditional ways were wiped out in a nuclear attack!

5. Who was the first to use internet?

Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on ARPANet as he tried to connect to Stanford Research Institute on October 29, 1969. The system crashed as he typed the letter G in LOGIN!

6. How was early internet like?

The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to learn to use a very complex system.

7. How did EMAIL came about?

Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents email program to send messages across a distributed network. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the username and address. It was chosen because of its "at" meaning.

8. What is an Ethernet?

It's a protocol or system for a set of computer networking technologies for local area networks

(LANs), the origins of which came from Bob Metcalfe's Harvard's dissertation on "Packet

Networks."

9. How is TCP and IP related to ARPANet?

As the ARPANET grew in size and scope, two other important protocols appeared:

• In 1974, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) was introduced as a draft specification that described how to build a reliable, host-to-host data transfer service over a network.
  
  
• In 1981, Internet Protocol (IP) was introduced in draft form and described how to implement an addressing standard and route packets between interconnected networks.
  
  

On January 1, 1983, ARPANET began to require standard use of the TCP and IP protocols for all network traffic and essential communication. From this date forward, ARPANET started to become more widely known as the Internet.

10. What was the Net's first index called?

The first effort, other than library catalogs, to index the Internet was created in 1989, as Peter Deutsch and his crew at McGill University in Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which they named Archie. This spouted similar index known as Veronica and Jughead.

11. Which decade really saw the explosion of the net?

It is in the 1990s. The internet exploded into the mainstream with the release of the first

popular web browser Mosaic in 1993.

12. Do you know?

Backrub was the original name for Google! Larry Page and Sergey Brin used this term for

their search engine in 1996, Google as we know it debuted in 1998. The name Google is a twist

on the word Googol, a number represented as 1 followed by 100 zeros.

To date, internet has got to be the fastest growing media. that took 38 years for radio and

13 years for TV. In contrast, it only took 5 years for internet to do so.

Last but not least, an interesting short clip that provides a brief history of the internet.

Enjoy! :D