A short history of the Internet

History

See also: History of the Internet

A computer network, or simply a network, is a collection of computers and other hardware components interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information. As of 2015 computer networks are the core of modern communication. Computers control all modern aspects of the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Telephony increasingly runs over the Internet Protocol, although not necessarily over the public Internet. The scope of communication has increased significantly in the past decade. This boom in communications would not have been possible without the progressively advancing computer network. Computer networks, and the technologies that make communication between networked computers possible, continue to drive computer the hardware, software, and peripherals industries. The expansion of related industries is mirrored by growth in the numbers and types of people using networks, from the researcher to the home user.
The chronology of significant computer-network developments includes:

• In the late 1950s early networks of communicating computers included the military radar system Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE).
• In 1959 Anatolii Ivanovich Kitov proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a detailed plan for the re-organisation of the control of the Soviet armed forces and of the Soviet economy on the basis of a network of computing centres.^[2]
• In 1960 the commercial airline reservation system semi-automatic business research environment (SABRE) went online with two connected mainframes.
• In 1962 J.C.R. Licklider developed a working group he called the "Intergalactic Computer Network", a precursor to the ARPANET, at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
• In 1964 researchers at Dartmouth College developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System for distributed users of large computer systems. The same year, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research group supported by General Electric and Bell Labs used a computer to route and manage telephone connections.
• Throughout the 1960s, Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, and Donald Davies independently developed network systems that used packets to transfer information between computers over a network.
• In 1965, Thomas Marill and Lawrence G. Roberts created the first wide area network (WAN). This was an immediate precursor to the ARPANET, of which Roberts became program manager.
• Also in 1965, Western Electric introduced the first widely used telephone switch that implemented true computer control.
• In 1969 the University of California at Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah became connected as the beginning of the ARPANET network using 50 kbit/s circuits.^[3]
• In 1972 commercial services using X.25 were deployed, and later used as an underlying infrastructure for expanding TCP/IP networks.
• In 1973, Robert Metcalfe wrote a formal memo at Xerox PARC describing Ethernet, a networking system that was based on the Aloha network, developed in the 1960s by Norman Abramson and colleagues at the University of Hawaii. In July 1976, Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs published their paper "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks"^[4] and collaborated on several patents received in 1977 and 1978. In 1979 Robert Metcalfe pursued making Ethernet an open standard.^[5]
• In 1976 John Murphy of Datapoint Corporation created ARCNET, a token-passing network first used to share storage devices.
• In 1995 the transmission speed capacity for Ethernet increased from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s. By 1998, Ethernet supported transmission speeds of a Gigabit. The ability of Ethernet to scale easily (such as quickly adapting to support new fiber optic cable speeds) is a contributing factor to its continued use as of 2015.^[5]
• ^{end partial quote from:}
• ^{computer networks}
•  
•