Introduction
Internet is a blend of services. Network of networks. Only other hand it's the world greatest information super highway. It has many interconnected networks, large number of routers and gateways and millions Servers and uncountable number of PC s. People spent billions of dollars and still they are spending money to create, maintain and extend this network infrastructure. The question is why we need networks?
The answer is "to share the resources". Networks doing great roll in resources sharing drama. All companion services of the internet (Ftp service, Gopher service, WAIS service ,Usenet , E mail and new shining star www) were invented with the purpose of sharing resources.
Here is a summery of Internet history.
1969-Birth of Internet
ARPANET commissioned by Department of Defense for research into networking
First node at UCLA (Los angeles) closely followed by nodes at Stanford Research Institute, UCSB (Santa Barbara) and U of Utah
1971-People communicate over a network
15 nodes(23 hosts) on ARPANET
E mail invented-a program to send messages across a distributed network.(And nowadays too)
1972-computers can connect more freely and easily
First public demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines.
Internetworking Working Group(INWG) created to address need for establishing agreed upon protocols
Telnet specification. Telnet is still a relevant means of inter-machine connection today
1973-Global Networking becomes a reality
First international connection to the ARPANET: university collage of London and Royal Radar establishment (Norway)
Ethernet outlined-this how local networks are basically connected today.
Internet ideas started.
Gateways define how large networks can be connect together.
File Transfer Protocol(FTP) specified
1974- Packets become mode of transfer
Transmission Control Protocol(TCP) specified.
Telnet, a commercial version of ARPANET opened-the first public packet data service
1979-News groups raised
Computer science department research computer network established in USA.
USENET established and still thrives today.
Three news groups established by the end of year.
ARPA establishes the Internet Configuration Control Board(ICCB).
Packet Radio Network (PRNET) experiment stars with ARPA funding.
Most communication take place between mobile vans,
1981-Things start to come together
CSNET(Computer Science NETwork) established to provide networking services to university scientists with no access to ARPANET.
This CSNET later becomes known as the Computer and Science Network.
1982-TCP/IP defines future communication
DCA and ARPA establishes the Transmission Control Protocol(TCP) and Internet Protocol(IP), as a protocol suit.
1983-Internt gets bigger
Name server developed.
Large number of nodes.
Hard to remember exact path.
Desktop workstations come into being.
Internet Activities Board established ,replacing ICCB
1984-Growth internet continues
Number of hosts breaks 1000.
Domain name servers(DNS) introduced.
1986- Power of internet realized
5000 hosts and 241 news groups.
NSFNET created (backbone speed 56 Kbps)
NSF established five super computing centers to provide high computing power for all.
Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) designed to enhance Usenet news performance over TCP/IP.
1987-Commercialisation of internet begins
Number of hosts 28 000
1991-Borth of world wide web
World wide web released by CERN; by Tim Burners-lee.
Originally developed to provide a distributed hypermedia system.
Easy access to any form of information anywhere in the world.
Initially non graphic.
Revolutionized modern communications and even our way of life.
1992- Multimedia changes the face of Internet
Number of hosts breaks 1 million and news groups 4000.
Internet society (ISOC) is chartered.
First MBONE audio multicast (March) and video multicast(November).
The term "Surfing the internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly
1993-The www revolution truly begins.
Number of hosts 2 million.
600 www sites.
InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific internet services
1 Directory and database services.
2 Registration services.
3 Information services.
Business and media really take notice of the internet.
US white house and United Nations(UN) comes on line.
Mosaic takes the internet by storm.
1994-commercialization begins
Number of hosts 3 million and 10 000 www sites.
10000 news groups.
ARPANET/Internet celebrates the 25th anniversary.
Local communities begin to be wired up directly to the internet.
US senate and white house provide information servers.
Shopping malls, banks arrive on the internet.
NSFNET traffic passes 10 trillion bytes per month.
www edges out telnet to become 2nd most popular service on the net.
UK HM Treasury on line(http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/)
1995-Comercialization continues .
6.5 million hosts, 100,000 www sites.
NSFNET revert back to a research network.
Main US backbone traffic now routed through interconnected network providers.
www surpasses FTP-data in March as the service with greatest traffic on NSFNET based on packet count, and in April based on byte count.
Traditional on line dial up systems (AOL, Compuserve) begin to provide on line access.
A number of net related companies go public, with Netscape leading the pack.
Registration of domain names is no longer free.
Technologies of the year: www, search engines.
New www technologies emerged (java, java script, Active x)
1996-Microsoft enters to www
The www browser war begins, fought primary between Netscape and Microsoft. And finally Microsoft's internet explorer wins.
Before www (World Wide Web) came to the roll other services were so populated. But people have to have some talents to use these services except WWW. (Just like UNIX and Windows).
After WWW introduced it defeat all other services and come to major place.
Though other old services and tools such as "telnet and ftp" still working
Most of you never need to use them directly because now we have easy to use web based clients to do same works. But remember old is gold. There are some people who love to use these old services. Majority of them are hackers, skilled individuals who have great understanding and knowledge about programming and systems. In the cyberspace they are like free birds. They haven't boundary, they do anything with their special tools and find everything they need instantly. How they do that. Are they having Aladdin's Lamp? No because they don't serf internet regular way, they surf internet from different way…
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Further readings:
Source:"Local area networks" by James E. Goldman
The internet offers three major service categories.
1 The World Wide Web.
2 Information servers
* FTP servers
* Gopher servers
* WAIS servers
* UseNet servers
3 Global e-mails
I don't going to mention about global e-mail and the world wide web, here. I only mention about Information servers.
Text based information stored in internet connected servers can be assessed by remote user logins into these servers via a TCP/IP protocol known as "Telnet". Once they are successfully logged in to an internet based information server, using either user accounts and passwords or general access "anonymous" user accounts, User can execute programs on the remote computer as if they were locally attached.
To download or transfer information back to their client PCs user would access another TCP/IP protocol call "FTP" (file transfer protocol).
Servers that support such activity are often called "FTP servers". The difficulty with searching for information in this manner is that a user must know the IP of the information server they wish to access.
The menu based system which features search engines that comb through all of the information in all of these information servers is referred as the "Gopher system". This system was developed in university of Minnesota.
The main different between the gopher system and www is gopher's information text based whereas the www is largely graphical.
A third type of information server offers a text searching service known as WAIS (wide area information services). WAIS indexes generate multiple indexes for all types of files that organizations or individuals wish to offer access to via the internet. WAIS servers offer these multiple indexes to another internet attached WAIS servers. WAIS servers also serve as searching engines which have the ability to search for particular word or text string in the indexes located across multiple internet attached information servers of various types.
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Upcoming: Surf internet (different way) 2 –Be a anonymous ,protect your privacy.
