Not to be confused with the World Wide Web.
The Internet is an enormous global computer network connecting billions of computers and is one of the most revolutionary technological achievements in history. Internet allows, besides others, browsing the World Wide Web (WWW), sending electronic mail, communicating via instant text messages, making calls, streaming videos, playing video games and sharing files – all of this world-wide, reliably and with latency in order of milliseconds.
Even if it's very difficult to get accurated statistics, it is estimated that by 2020, there were over 4.5 billion users of the Internet, about 2 billion websites and over 20 billion devices connected to the network transferring hundreds of petabytes of data every month.
Internet as we know it evolved from ARPANET
(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). ARPANET was the first
bigger network that worked on the principle of sending
packets of data (so called packet switching), and was
created as an experiment of the
US department of defense. As such, the network was designed to be
robust, decentralized and resisting failures and attacks – this is why
packet switching was used: it allowed the network to have no central
nodes which would pose a weakness; packets of data can be resent and
take different routes when one path becomes unavailable. ARPANET was
officially started on 1969-10-29, when the first
message was sent over it by Charley Kline: the message read
Lo.
The intent was to send Login, but the system crashed
after the first two letters. This moment can be seen as the beginning of
the Internet. The network, at this time, only consisted of two machines:
one at LA University of California, the other one at Stanford1. More institutions then began
connecting to ARPANET, mostly universities. By 1971 ARPANET had 15
interconnected nodes and reached from east to west coast of the USA.
On 1983-01-01 ARPANET adopted new TCP/IP protocols
over the older NCP (Network Control Program) and later that year also
DNS (Domain Name System). This can be seen as a transition to modern
Internet as these technolgies are at the core of the Internet until
today: the TCP/IP protocols assign each computer in the network a unique
numeric IP address to which the DNS assigns
human-readable domain addresses such as
example.com. ARPANET was officially decommissioned in 1990
and then slowly shut down, but by then there were already other networks
offering access to the big network – the network of networks that by now
is already referred to as the Internet (the word itself can be traced
back to 1974). At this time there were already the first
internet service providers (ISPs) that brought access
to the Internet to the public.
Also in California.↩︎
This page was last edited on 2026-09-25 02:04:49.
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