INTERNET BASICS
A Short History of the Internet
The Internet has not been around very long. It began in 1969 as a project the U.S. Department of Defense created to link some of their engineers with civilian research contractors, including some universities doing military-funded research. Back then, it was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Administration Network) and it was three computers connected by telephone lines. One of the benefits of the original system was that the transmission process involved something called packet switching, which encoded the data and sent it in pieces which were re-assembled at the destination computer. The advantage to this system is that packets can be re-routed if a channel is busy, offline, or down. This is still the way files are transmitted across the internet. When you watch a page jerkily load itself in your browser window, you're watching packets reassemble and display onscreen. If you find that you're waiting an inordinate amount of time for a page to load on your screen, you can hit your browser's Stop button, and then the Reload button, and the host computer will re-send you the packets that make up the page you're looking for -- possibly with better routing the second time around.
By the late 1980s, other government agencies and universities had joined the ARPANET and traffic grew exponentially. The National Science Foundation (NSF) took over with a bigger, faster, and easier network. As minicomputers became popular, commercial Internet providers began offering access to the internet to private individuals and companies.
Welcome to the information superhighway. Today, there are thousands of commercial Internet providers. Each provider needs only a fast computer and high-speed, high-quality connection to the Internet to license its services. In 1994, traffic on the World Wide Web grew by 1,713 percent.
Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and it's the web address you're familiar with seeing; something like:
http://www.howardcc.edu/ is an URL.
It's the address on the internet where a specific web page (and its links) can be found. For more on URLs, click on the link below:
If you're interested in reading more, surf some of the sites that discuss the origins of the internet below: