Introduction History Internet services Technical Report Games References

History

The beggining of the Internet is strictly connected with a Sputnik, the first artificial satellite of the Earth, launched by Russians. Americans’ Defence Departament was very concerned about it and brought ARPA into existance. ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) was a government Agency responsible for build communication net for military targets that will be able to work even if traditional ways of communication will not – in a case of a nuclear attack. In 1969 ARPAnet, an experimental net came into being. It was build of four computers connected together and situated in four different states. Every one of them had this same task, so in a case of breakdown of one of them, the net could still work. 





Few weeks later there was a first attempt of remote connecion. The plan was unprecedented: Kleinrock, a pioneering computer science professor at UCLA, and his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and try to send it some data.They would start by typing "login", and seeing if the letters appeared on the far-off monitor.






"We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI...," Kleinrock ... said in an interview: "We typed the L and we asked on the phone,

"Do you see the L?"
 "Yes, we see the L,  came the response.
"We typed the O, and we asked,
"Do you see the O."
 "Yes, we see the O."
"Then we typed the G, and the system crashed"...

In spite of that, a small step forward was done.


In 1973 the first international connection was established from USA to the United Kingdom and three years later Queen Elizabeth II sent out a first e-mail. In 1980 the Transport Control Protocol – Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was developed. TCP/IP is a protocol which is still in use and which is the basis for determining what the Internet is. It was designed to solve problems with communication between computers undertaken by ARPAnet. TCP divides data into packages and assures its reliable transmission while IP is responsible for sending datagrams, that is packages equipped with an address, through the net. Then, in 1984 the Domain Name System (DNS) was invented. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to human into the numerical identifiers. Four years later a first virus called Internet Worm appeared. In this same year a student from Finland constructed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) which made talks possible in the real time. In this time there were about 100 000 hosts in the Internet. Soon the World Wide Web, known also as WWW or W3 appeared. It is a system of interlinked hypertext documents. With a web browser pages that contain text, images and videos can be displayed. Finally, in 1991 Poland has been connected to the Internet.