Introduction to computer science dessalegn Mequanint Yehuala Foreword

Origin of the Internet
The history of the Internet started in the United States in the early 1960s. It begun with the
development of electronic computers in the 1950s. It started as a project of the United States
government’s Department of Defense, to create a non-centralized network. This project was
called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), created by the Pentagon’s
Advanced Research Projects Agency established in 1969 to provide a secure and survivable
communications network for organizations engaged in defense-related research[2].
In order to make the network more global a new sophisticated and standard protocol was
needed. They developed IP (Internet Protocol) technology which defined how electronic
messages were packaged, addressed, and sent over the network. The standard protocol was
invented in 1977 and was called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). TCP/
IP allowed users to link various branches of other complex networks directly to the ARPANET,
which soon came to be called the Internet.
Researchers and academics in other fields began to make use of the network, and eventually
the National Science Foundation (NSF), which had created a similar and parallel network,
called NSFNet, took over much of the TCP/IP technology from ARPANET and established a
distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic. In 1985, NSF began
a program to establish Internet access across the United States. They created a backbone
called the NSFNET and opened their doors to all educational facilities, academic researchers,
government agencies, and international research organizations. By the 1990’s the Internet
experienced explosive growth. It is estimated that the number of computers connected to the
Internet was doubling every year.
Businesses rapidly realized that, by making effective use of the Internet they could tune their
operations and offer new and better services to their customers, so they started spending vast
amounts of money to develop and enhance the Internet. This generated violent competition
among the communications carriers and hardware and software suppliers to meet this demand.
The result is that bandwidth (i.e., the information carrying capacity of communications lines) on
the Internet has increased tremendously and costs have dropped. It is widely believed that the
Internet has played a significant role in the economic success.

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