A Brief History of the Internet
When and why was the internet invented? How big is the internet? Who owns the internet? I will attempt to give you a brief answer to these and other questions in this short article. A detailed history of the internet can be found at davesite.com
When Was it Invented and What was it invented for?
Way back in 1957, Russia launched Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. This pissed off the United States of America. Russia was miles ahead in the arms race. In response, the US forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense to establish their lead in science and technology as applied to the military.
In 1962, Rand Paul Baran (of the RAND Corporation) proposed a packet switched network to control missiles and bombers after a nuclear attack so that the military could have control of a counter attack from any remote location.
Six years later, ARPA hires Honeywell to develop the system.
It took Honeywell 4 years to develop the system, and in 1972 the first e-mail was sent. The system slowly grew, and as technology advanced, data transfer rates increased, the system was upgraded, and more and more hosts were added to the system.
“The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, with the first working system deployed in 1990, while he was working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). He went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium, which seeks to standardize and improve World Wide Web-related things such as the HTML markup language in which web pages are written.
Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser and the first web server. Tim Berners-Lee invented both the HTML markup language and the HTTP protocol used to request and transmit web pages between web servers and web browsers, in addition to coining the phrase “World Wide Web.”
By 1992, there were over a million hosts when CERN officially released the first version of the World Wide Web. The very first web site was nxoc01.cern.ch, and the very first web page was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. That site shut down a long time ago.
How Many Websites Actually Exist?
This is a nearly impossible question to answer. While google.com is a very distinct website, would you consider mac.com an entire website, or count each individual members pages as separate sites in and of them selves? Then there are people who have registered distinct domain name but use it only as a forwarding url to a member page on a site such as mac.com
On Monday, September 26, 2005, Google claimed it had indexed over 8.17 billion distinct web pages. While my website has a distinct number of pages, dynamic websites, like Amazon, have an infinite number of possible pages. Google claims it is smart enough not to index every possible dynamic page. The average website has approximately 100 unique pages.
While no one knows the exact number of website that are live today, the web community estimates that the number is now well over 70 million.
Who owns the internet?
No one actually owns the Internet, and no single person or organization controls the Internet in its entirety. More of a concept than an actual tangible entity, the Internet relies on a physical infrastructure that connects networks to other networks.
There are many organizations, corporations, governments, schools, private citizens and service providers that all own pieces of the infrastructure, but there is no one body that owns it all. There are, however, organizations that oversee and standardize what happens on the Internet and assign IP addresses and domain names, such as the National Science Foundation, the Internet Engineering Task Force, ICANN, InterNIC and the Internet Architecture Board.