Internet History Essays (911 words) - ARPANET, Digital Technology

Internet History The Internet was created in 1969 by scientists working for ARPA. ARPA stands for advanced research projects agency, and was formed to create a network of computers that could save information in the event of a nuclear attack. UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City were the first ARPANET locations. The ARPANET is what is now called the Internet. The plan was unprecedented: A professor at UCLA, and his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and try to send it some data. They would start by typing "login," and asking by telephone if the letters appeared on the far-off monitor. On their first attempt, the "L" and "O" were transmitted successfully, but after they typed the letter "G" the system crashed. From 1969 to 1983 a lot of different packet switching schemes were tried and TCP/IP is what grew OUT of ARPANET, not what started ARPANET. During most of the seventies, the protocol was generally referred to as just the Network Control Protocol or NCP. The term Internet was probably first applied to a 1973 research program that culminated in a demonstration system in 1977. It demonstrated networking through various mediums, including satellite, radio, telephone, ethernet, etc. using packet switching. And this formed the roots of the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). But it was not until 1983 that all nodes on ARPANET were required to use TCP/IP to connect to it. Also in 1983, the Department of Defense moved the unclassified portions of the Data Defense Network to create MILLET. Then in January 1983, the ARPA Internet first appears and operation was passed to the Defense Communications Agency. The first operating, non-experimental, real live Internet with a capital network, was a military network with a couple of hundred computers connected to it. Universities and the general public were not welcome on the ARPANET. It was a network for Department of Defense contractors and military sites. Then a group of military contractors with strong ties to business and universities not on the MILLET were constantly in a situation where many of their peers were not on the Net while they were on. They began campaigning for access for other researchers. In 1984 the National Science Foundation established an office for networking. a number of universities and research groups actually did get access to ARPANET. In 1993, Tim Lee created an interface to the World Wide Web he called Mosaic. The NSF actually funded further development of a Macintosh and Microsoft Windows version of Mosaic through a grant to the University. The first Microsoft Windows version appeared about November of 1993. The Mosaic Web Browser put a pretty face on the Internet. You could navigate the World Wide Web by clicking on links with the mouse. More importantly, it allowed users to add "players" for sound, video clips, or anything else they wanted to add. Today, advanced Mosaic browsers such as Netscape have added other functions quite beyond World Wide Web, including electronic mail. Electronic mail, or E-mail as it is commonly called, was invented by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 as a way of sending messages of the Internet to other users on-line. His program for sending E-mail was called SNDMSG, which stands for send message. Now E-mail has grown so much that next year people will send an estimated 6 trillion messages. A new use for the Internet that is influencing the lives of many Internet users is the creation of E-wrestling leagues. E-wrestling is a type of game in which you create wrestling matches over E-mail. You can challenge other members of your E-fed (a group of members in your league) by posting messages on the message board. The other member will then respond to your challenge by writing back on the message board. If the commissioner approves of the match then he will send an E-mail to the two members telling when the match will take place. There are two ways a commissioner can create matches, depending on the rules of your federation. One way is to write out the entire match. This takes a long time and the results are based on the opinion of the commissioner. The other way involves using a computer to decide the winner. My federation uses "Zeus", a computer program found on the Internet, to simulate the matches. The good thing about this type of match is it can be made quickly, the matches are fair and based on wrestlers attributes,