The launch of the Soviet artificial Earth satellite in 1957 served as a prerequisite for the creation of such a network. After this event, in order to increase information security in the event of war, the United States Department of Defense urgently ordered the development of a reliable data transmission system and allocated the necessary funding for it. The task of creating a computer network was assigned to the special agency DARPA, which was responsible for introducing new technologies in the United States. Over time, ARPANET developed and became widely used by scientists from various fields of science.
The first attempt to establish a network connection was made on October 29, 1969. Charley Kline from the University of California (Los Angeles) tried to remotely connect to a computer located 640 km away at the Stanford Research Institute, where Bill Duvall confirmed the successful transmission of each character by telephone. However, out of the five letters of the word “LOGON”, which was a system login command, only the first three characters – “LOG” – were transmitted successfully on the first attempt, after which the network crashed. Nevertheless, after ARPANET was restored a few hours later, the next attempt by researchers to establish a remote connection was successful. The date 22.10.1969 can rightfully be considered the birth of the first Internet in the world.
The first program for exchanging emails over the global network appeared in 1971 and immediately became popular among Internet users. In 1984, a domain name system was introduced, allowing users to obtain information about a website’s domain in the network.
In addition, in 1984 another large-scale network called NSFNet was created by the National Science Foundation of the United States. It included many smaller networks, including the then-popular Bitnet and Usenet, and had significantly higher bandwidth compared to ARPANET. Thus, ARPANET gained a serious competitor. More than 10,000 computers connected to NSFNet in less than a year, and the word “Internet” gradually became associated with this network. However, the global network became the main data provider only by 1995, when its traffic exceeded the widely used FTP file transfer protocol. This led to the creation of the W3C – the World Wide Web Consortium. It is worth noting that it was the World Wide Web that gave shape to the previously faceless Internet. Thus, since 1996, the terms “Internet” and “World Wide Web” have been used almost interchangeably.
