History & Origin of the internet

            The Internet has come a long way in the past 50 years. New innovations such as integrated software and hardware has changed the way that people view and receive information today. "The Internet is a network connecting many computer networks and is based on a common addressing system and communications protocol." It has become one of the fastest growing forms of communication today. (Encyclopedia Britannica 1999).

             The Internet got started by the Defense Department as a Cold War experiment in the 1950"s. The government needed a way to relay information between tanks and headquarters so the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) came up with a way to let signals from the battlefield reach a headquarters computer, using satellites and radio signals (Buick pg. 122).

             Paul Baran, who worked for the U.S. Air Force, developed a network to fix this problem, by using "redundancy of connectivity". This meant that if there were a break in the network, the server would re-route the information on an alternate path through a new technique called "packet switching." Packet Switching is a means of breaking up the message being sent into small sections. The message after being broken up would take separate routes to the destination and then be put back together by the computer at the server (www.davesite.com Internet). This was a great idea because the enemy didn"t have just one place to focus on. They didn"t know where the information was coming from or being sent.

             Vinton Cerf also called "The Father of the Internet"; a graduate student working at UCLA began to take interest in ARPAnet, and in 1973 developed the first TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) software (Buick pg. 123). TCP/IP software converts messages into streams, transmits them across different networks, and puts them back together at the destination (Buick pg. 123). .

             When ARPAnet first started, it was mainly limited to military business by the ARPA.

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