From ARPANET Roots to Modern Web: The History of the Internet

The Dawn of the Internet: ARPANET

In 1969, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Department of Defense funded a revolutionary project: ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). The goal was to create a decentralized communication network capable of surviving even a nuclear attack.

On October 29, 1969, the first message was sent between two computers: one at UCLA and one at Stanford Research Institute. The word was “LOGIN”, but the system crashed after the first two letters: “LO”. A humble beginning for what would become the greatest technological revolution in history.

The Protocols That Changed Everything

TCP/IP: The Universal Language

In the 1970s, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed the TCP/IP protocol, which became the standard for network communication. This protocol allows different computers to communicate with each other, regardless of manufacturer or operating system.

IP Address: 192.168.1.1
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.1.254

DNS: Giving Names to Numbers

In 1983, Paul Mockapetris invented the Domain Name System (DNS), which allows associating readable names (like google.com) with numeric IP addresses. Without DNS, we would have to remember number sequences for every site we want to visit.

From the World Wide Web to Today

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, proposed a system for sharing information among scientists. Thus the World Wide Web was born, based on three fundamental technologies:

HTML - the language for structuring content
HTTP - the protocol for transferring data
URL - the system for identifying resources

The first website was published in 1991, and from that moment growth has been exponential.

The Evolution Continues

Today the Internet is very different from what it was in the ’90s. We have witnessed:

Web 2.0: social networks, user-generated content
Mobile first: smartphones and apps
Cloud computing: globally distributed services
Web 3.0: blockchain and decentralization

Conclusions

Understanding the history of the Internet helps us better understand current challenges: security, privacy, net neutrality. The decisions made by pioneers in the ’60s and ’70s still influence the way we design and develop web applications today.

The next time you open your browser, remember: you’re using a technology that required decades of innovation and the collaboration of thousands of people around the world.