THE HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

(Let’s relive our history)

Like most of humanity’s great inventions, the Internet was born as an instrument of war, having begun as the ARPANET during the Cold War in 1969. It was developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), in partnership with several military contractors and universities to explore the possibility of network communication that could withstand a nuclear attack: “Digital Communications in Times of Nuclear Crisis.”

Fearing an attack on their media, they decided to develop a network in which packets of information could follow an infinite number of alternate routes, if necessary, to reach their destination. This network would be called CATENET and would be developed by DARPA, The Defense Advanced Internet Program, which is why it is also known as the ARPANET.

Around 1975, DARPA declared the project a success and passed its administration to the U.S. Department of Defense Communications. By 1980 the TCP and IP protocols (which together form TCP/IP, which enabled all networks to send and receive data through the same facility) were already a reality, and by 1983 ARPANET adopted them. This adaptation of TCP/IP to ARPANET is considered to be the birth of the Internet.

In 1989 a research team in Switzerland belonging to CERN (European Centre for Particle Research), developed a series of protocols for transferring hypertext via the Internet. In 1990, a hypertext protocol was introduced that allowed communication through graphical information, called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). It was possible to create sites of graphic pages, called WEB sites, which constituted a large virtual network of hypertext called the World Wide Web, WWW.

This is only the beginning of an exponential revolution, which paradoxically would only end with a nuclear war.