WWW Hot Topic: Internet 25th Anniversary

In the 1960's, the U.S. Department of Defense grappled with the problem of making a decentralized computer network so that it wouldn't have a single "point of failure", a network hub which could be targeted and disabled in nuclear attack. This experiment, administered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, became known as the ARPANet.

The first "Interface Message Processor", a predecessor to today's routers, was installed at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) "around Labor Day in 1969". So we are marking September 1 as the anniversary date of the Internet.

By the end of the year, 4 defense research sites were connected to ARPANet. Between 1969 and 1983 many advances in the lower-level internetworking protocols led to the TCP and IP protocols we use on the Internet today. The Net continued to grow.

The versatility of TCP/IP led to its use in other networks besides ARPANet. In 1987, the National Science Foundation created the NSFNet, a TCP/IP network to connect its supercomputing centers with universities. It was opened up to the public and to allies of the USA. The combination of the NSFNet and the regional networks that it spawned became known as the Internet.

Among many ironies resulting from the end of the Cold War, this Cold War invention has become available to every country in the world, though not all are connected yet. Over the years, the growth of the Internet was estimated to be at a fairly steady 10% per month. In 1994 the Internet's growth exploded, with estimates passing 3.2 million machines in a June survey.

• Information Sources
  • History of the Internet, source: InterNIC Information Services, San Diego, CA, USA
  • Internet History, source: The Internet Society, Reston, VA, USA
  • Hobbes' Internet Timeline 1.3a by Robert H'obbes' Zakon, source: Amdahl WWW server, text provided by author via e-mail
  • FYI 20: What is the Internet? (a.k.a. RFC 1462), source: InterNIC Directory Services, Bedminster, NJ, USA
  • "...Dramatic Growth in 1994", Internet Society press release
• Related Information
  • USENET history, source: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA, USA
  • Unix 25th Anniversary, source: special hot topic page at Amdahl
  • Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Processing, source: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

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