History of the Internet and the Computer

By: Allen LaNear

•Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) was a construction engineer for the Henschel Aircraft Company in Berlin.

•Konrad Zuse earned the semiofficial title of "inventor of the modern computer”.

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/zuse.html

•In 1936, Zuse made a mechanical calculator called the Z1, the first binary computer.

•Zuse used it to explore several groundbreaking technologies in calculator development.

•Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper designed the MARK series of computers at Harvard University.

•Used by the US Navy for gunnery and ballistic calculations, the Mark I was in operation until 1959.

•Electrical engineer J. Presper Eckert invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, the ENIAC, with John William Mauchly.

•Additional collaboration between the two engineers led to the evolution of the first commercial digital electronic computer, UNIVAC.

http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/mauchly/jwmintro.html

•Electrical engineers were aware on the potential of digital electronics, however, they faced a big limitation known as the "Tyranny of Numbers."

•Both, Kilby at Texas Instruments, and Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, were working on a solution to this problem during 1958 and 1959.

•The solution was found in the monolithic (meaning formed from a single crystal) integrated circuit.

http://nobelprize.org/educational/physics/integrated_circuit/history/

•The electric telegraph is a now outdated communication system that transmitted electric signals over wires from location to location that translated into a message.

•The non-electric telegraph was invented by Claude Chappe in 1794.

•This system was visual and used semaphore, a flag-based alphabet, and depended on a line of sight for communication.

•Computers cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1960s. That meant there weren't many powerful computers to go around for the military personnel and scientists who needed them. 

•To solve the problem, the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) decided to try to connect a handful of large computers so they could share software, research information, or even storage space across whole states. 

•They established a system called ARPAnet, which had four main hubs: the Universities of California in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, the University of Utah, and SRI International.

http://smithsonian.yahoo.com/internethistory.html

•Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1972. Like many of the Internet inventors, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an ARPANET contractor.

•He picked the @ symbol from the computer keyboard to denote sending messages from one computer to another.

•So then, for anyone using Internet standards, it was simply a matter of nominating name-of-the-user@name-of-the-computer. http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html

•Initially created as part of the ARPANET research project in 1973, TCP stood for Transmission Control Program rather than protocol, as specified in Internet Engineering Task Force RFC (Request for Comments) 675.

•The success of TCP closely mirrored the fortunes of ARPANET, which eventually evolved into the modern Internet.

•The idea of network news was born in 1979 when two graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of using UUCP to connect machines for the purpose of information exchange among users.

•When the volume continued to grow, it was rewritten by Mark Horton and Matt Glickman, who called it the ``B'' release (a.k.a. Bnews).

•The first public release of Bnews was version-2.1 in 1982.

http://tldp.org/LDP/nag/node256.html

•Founded in 1987, UUNET is recognized not only as the first commercial Internet service provider (ISP), but it is also the world's leading Internet carrier.

•It owns and operates one of the most widely deployed IP networks in the world, with more than 2,500 POPs (points of presence, or primary Internet connections) providing Internet connectivity in more than 100 countries.