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Telegraph
Cooke and Wheatstone Used Morse Code, a series of dots and dashes used to communicate between humans.
The electric telegraph was the first practical use of electricity and from the 1840's. It transformed world communications. After a transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866, messages between Europe and North America took only hours to arrive rather than weeks.
Link: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/revealing-the-real-cooke-and-wheatstone-telegraph-dial/ -
Transatlantic Cable
Allowed direct instantaneous communication across the Atlantic. Today, cables connect all continents and are still a main hub of telecommunications.
The cable had been successfully laid, stretching nearly 2,000 miles across the Atlantic at a depth often of more than two miles. On August 16, President James Buchanan and Queen Victoria exchanged formal introductory and complimentary messages.
Link: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-transatlantic-telegraph-cable-completed -
Telephone
Telephone exchanges provided the backbone of Internet connections. Modems provide Digital to Audio conversions to allow computers to connect over the telephone network.
Bell started working on the harmonic telegraph — a device that allowed multiple messages to be transmitted over a wire at the same time.
Link: https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/alexander-graham-bell -
U.S.S.R launches Sputnik
That launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age and the U.S.-U.S.S.R space race. Sputnik was the first communication satellite. This was a push among government officials in the United States to catch up to the Soviet Union.
Link: https://www.space.com/17888-first-satellite-sputnik-1-explained-infographic.html -
US forms ARPA to build military skills in computer technology
In computing, the technical cutting edge was usually pushed forward in government facilities, at government-funded research centers, or at private contractors doing government work. These projects proved instrumental in establishing a sound mathematical basis for computer design and computer processing.
Link: https://www.nap.edu/read/6323/chapter/6#88 -
Dr. J.C.R Licklider
Dr. Licklider’s detailed description of the challenges to establishing a time-sharing network of computers that ultimately led to the creation of the ARPAnet. His 1968 paper called “The Computer as a Communication Device” illustrated his vision of network applications and predicted the use of computer networks for communications.Until then, computers had generally been thought of as mathematical devices for speeding up computations.
Link: https://internethalloffame.org/inductees/jcr-licklider -
Packet-Switching
This method of “packet switching” is a rapid store-and-forward design. When a node receives a packet it stores it, determines the best route to its destination, and sends it to the next node on that path. If there was a problem with a node, packets would simply be routed around it.
Link: https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html -
Information Message Processors
The ARPANET was set to be a fully distributed network that made use of routers at every node to speed up communication between computers. Each router had tasks to complete like to receive packets of data from both the computers connected to it, break message blocks into bytes, add the destination and the sender address and dynamically updated routing table.
Link: http://theconversation.com/how-the-internet-was-born-the-arpanet-comes-to-life-68062 -
The Birth of the Internet
Ray Tomlinson started his work on the SNDMSG allowed a user to compose, address, and send a message to other users' mailboxes on the same computer. Tomlinson hit on the idea to merge an intra-machine message program with another program developed for transferring files among the remote ARPANET computers.
Link: https://history-computer.com/Internet/Maturing/Tomlinson.html -
Transmission Control Protocol
The Transmission Control Protocol was created by Khan and he set four goals for the design. It was to have:
Network connectivity - any network could connect to another network through a gateway.
Distribution - There would be no central network administration or control.
Error recovery - Lost packets would be re transmitted.
Black box design - No internal changes would have to be made to a network to connect it to other networks.
Link: https://history-computer.com/Internet/Maturing/TCPIP.html -
USENET
Two students from Duke University (Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott) were experimenting with a method in which to efficiently send email and transfer files in an efficient and clear manner which simply did not exist in 1979. The idea was to provide access to users to share emails and files in an organized matter which would break down into topical categories in a forum type manner. They called this treasure USENET.
Link: https://www.newsdemon.com/history-of-usenet/beginning.php -
Domain Name Server
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. It is a more readily memorized domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for the purpose of locating and identifying computer services and devices with the underlying network protocols.
Link: http://www.historyofdomainnames.com/dns/ -
Power of the Internet Realized
The National Science Foundation connected five new supercomputer centers and allowed access to these centers at no cost. Regional and academic networks were able to connect. It experienced exponential growth in its network traffic.
Link: http://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=1302 -
Archie
The first search engine created was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University. The original intent of the name was "archives," but it was shortened to Archie. Archie helped solve this data scatter problem by combining a script-based data gatherer with a regular expression matcher for retrieving file names matching a user query. Essentially Archie became a database of web filenames which it would match with the users queries.
Link: http://www.searchenginehistory.com/ -
Gopher
Gopher was an information search and retrieval system. Developed by the University of Minnesota, it presented information in a standard format that was much less flexible than HTML, but much easier to set up. This was also the year that a friendly user interface became established.
Link: https://www.cnet.com/news/surf-the-net-like-its-1991-with-gopher/ -
Internet Growth
The World Wide Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications releases the Mosaic Web Browser. It was the first browser with a Graphical user interface for content. It developed into Netscape which was the most popular web browser before Internet Explorer was released.
Link: https://dayintechhistory.com/tag/mosaic-web-browser/
