In the classical sense, the Internet is a complex of many computer networks designed to store and exchange information. The Internet is often referred to as the worldwide or global network. Experts estimate that by mid-2012, more than 30 percent of the world's population was using the Internet. And the Internet appeared thanks to the confrontation between two superpowers.
NORAD
In 1949, an atomic bomb was tested in the Soviet Union, and 3 years later - a hydrogen bomb. In 1957, the first artificial Earth satellite was launched from a cosmodrome belonging to the USSR. The largest country on the planet has a vehicle capable of transporting a nuclear charge anywhere. The US government was concerned about the emerging situation and instructed scientists and engineers to create an early warning system for any threat. The shortest trajectory of missiles that the Soviet Union could send towards the United States ran through the North Pole, and therefore a complex with a warning system, dubbed NORAD, was built in northern Canada. Alas, despite the developed network of stations, such a system could notify the security forces about the approach of a rocket only 10-15 minutes before they reached the surface of the earth.
In 1964, an underground control center for the NORAD system began operating near Colorado Springs. With the help of powerful computers at that time, information coming from the stations began to be processed much faster. Within two years, air traffic services were connected to the system, and soon various meteorological services. Thus, in the mid-60s, a global computer network operated in the United States, which was used not only by the military, but also by civilian organizations and departments. But it was impossible to stop there. In the USSR, they began to make charges of such power, which are capable of leveling the Cheyenne Mountain, in the depths of which the "heart" of NORAD was based. Just one precise hit and the system will break down. In the United States, a search began for other methods of creating a network capable of functioning even after the defeat of several arbitrary areas.
APRANET
In the late 60s, specialists from several US universities developed and established the stable operation of a single computer network called APRANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). In 1968, a hypertext system was demonstrated at Stanford University. A year later, the experiment of transferring words between computers was recognized as successful. Two electronic computers were installed at a distance of 5 meters. From one such computer to another, the word login was passed. However, the connection was interrupted after the transmission of only two letters. In 1969, the network included computers from 4 educational institutions: the University of California (Los Angeles), California State University (Santa Barbara), Stanford University and the University of Utah. The money for the development of the system was transferred by the US Department of Defense. APRANET turned out to be so convenient that scientists began to use it. The first server of the future World Wide Web was a Honeywell DP-16 computer, which had 24 kilobytes of RAM.
In 1971, the first program for creating and sending emails was created. In 1973, the network went international. With the help of a transatlantic telephone cable, it was possible to connect computers in the USA, Norway and the UK. In the 70s, mainly e-mails were transmitted using the network. At the same time, the first mailing lists and message boards appeared. There were several dozen similar systems in the world that could not interact with each other due to technical differences, and then the process of standardizing data transfer protocols began, which ended in 1982-1983. On January 1, 1983, the APRANET network began to use the TCP / IP protocol, which has been successfully used until now. By that time, most people called APRANET the Internet.
INTERNET
In 1984, APRANET had a competitor. The NSFNet (National Science Foundation Network) was launched in the United States. It was made up of several smaller networks like Bitnet and Usenet and had a lot of bandwidth at the time. It is these two factors that have become the reason that the name "Internet" was still assigned not to APRANET, but to NSFNet. In just 10-12 months, about 10,000 computers were connected to the network.
In 1988, it became possible to communicate in real time on the Internet. This happened thanks to the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol. The concept of the World Wide Web as it is understood today was developed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. He is also considered the creator of the HTTP protocol and the HTML language.
In 1990, APRANET ceased to exist, as it lost to NSFNet in all respects in the competition. In 1991, the Internet went public, and in 1993, the first Mosaic Internet browser appeared. By 1997, about 10 million computers were connected to the Internet.
