internet history

2022

The history of the Internet
Birth of the World Wide Web (WWW)
The dotcom bubble
Internet history timeline

We explain everything about the history of the Internet, its timeline and the origin of the World Wide Web. Also, the dot-com bubble.

The Internet became popular in the 1990s.

The history of the Internet

We all know what it is today Internet, to the point where entire generations can no longer imagine a world devoid of this great net communications network, whose history is fairly recent.

The first antecedent of the Internet was telecommunications, whose first modern representative is the telegraph of the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, the invention of computers, the first copies of which, properly speaking, were calculating machines created for war purposes during the Second World War.

So thanks to many discoveries and inventions, in the middle of the 20th century, the first ideas regarding communication networks (and later, computerized networks) appeared.

The first mention of a computerized social interconnection, under the concept of networking (networking), comes from a series of memoranda by the American Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915-1990), nicknamed "Lick", at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the United States. In those memoranda, dated August 1962, "Lick" argued in favor of what he called the "Galactic Network."

In the 1950s and 1960s there were modest computer networks, dedicated to airport reservation systems (SABER) and defense and military control systems (AUTODIN I). In addition, by the 1960s, computer manufacturers had incorporated the technology of semiconductors.

Thus, new ways of managing time and resources were born, allowing large computers to "serve" different users at the same time, so quickly and efficiently that it gave the impression of being dedicated to each one of them exclusively. Hence the idea of having "guest" computers (hosts) Y servers (servers).

One of the first multipurpose computerized systems was the ARPANET, which emerged in 1969, a military project of the United States Department of Defense. This system connected different users in the computers of the different universities of the country. At the head of this project was Joseph Licklider himself.

That is why the creation of protocols communication systems that would allow such different computers to "speak" the same language, so to speak.

In 1973 ARPANET and NORSAR (a Norwegian computerized network for the detection of earthquakes and nuclear explosions), began exchanging computerized information, just before Great Britain also joined the project. Finally, the need for common communication protocols led to the birth of TCP / IP protocols in 1982.

During the 1980s, the Internet grew and slowly opened up to the commercial world, although still under criteria that were not too clear. ARPANET continued to grow and connect with other foreign networks throughout the world, detaching itself from its military powers in the process, until its closure in the early 1990s.

Then, another similar project of the American National Science Foundation absorbed the old ARPANET, to create NSFNET, the great network of scientists and universities.This is the embryo of what we know today as the Internet, which in 1990 already had 100,000 servers in the world.

The term "Internet" was proposed in the 1990s, as an acronym for Interconnected Netwoks (interconnected networks), but there are also those who interpret it as International NET (International network).

Birth of the World Wide Web (WWW)

Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau created the World Wide Web.

The world Wide Web (Global reach network), known at the time as the “global spider web”, was an invention of the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee (1955-) and the Belgian Robert Cailliau (1947-), who worked at CERN (European Council for the Nuclear Research).

It responded to the need to devise a recovery system for the enormous amount of information available in the then nascent Internet, linking logical information and textual content programmed in "tags" that, later, a Program interpreter was able to "read" and display information.

This is how the first programs capable of doing so emerged, called "search engines" or browsers, and that today we know as “browsers”. The first browser was Mosaic, which emerged in 1993, created by the American Marc Andreesen, the same one who would later create the first commercial browser, Netscape.

These types of programs were key to the dissemination of the Internet, its use by non-specialized users, and therefore in its global reach that we know today.

The dotcom bubble

It was known as the dotcom bubble or the dotcom bubble to a period of enormous financial growth of the Business Westerners linked to the Internet, and the then called "new economy".

This boom occurred between 1997 and 2001, and was characterized by the massive emergence of new companies linked to the digital sector, known as companies dot com (term from their domains on the Internet, ending in .com). Many of them had spectacular bankruptcies throughout this period, especially when the bubble burst at the beginning of the new century.

The so-called "crisis of the dot-com bubble" was predicted by many investors from its inception, in part due to the volatility of the financial market, which in stock markets such as New York registered a price above 5000 points in March of the year 2000.

However, in October 2002 it registered 1,300 points, even less than it originally had in 1996. During this period, between 2000 and 2003, around 4,850 companies linked to the Internet disappeared, due to bankruptcy or because they had been absorbed by stronger ones.