A Brief History
“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
-Eric Schmidt. CEO, Google
The internet in an interconnected network of networks that has dramatically changed the ways we communicate, work, play, learn and so much more. It’s hard to imagine a world without the internet, but the reality is that the internet as we know it is it’s only 35 years old.[1] In order to understand how the internet works specifically, we can look at how communication works in general.
A brief detour into graph theory
moduscreate.com/blog/game-of-forms-using-graph-theory-to-design-giant-web-forms/
TERMS: node, edge, protocol
The field of study concerned with how networks work is called network or graph theory A graph is an abstract representation of connections between entities. There are two fundamental elements in a graph, nodes and edges. A node can be just about anything, a person, a place, a word, an idea, a bug, a plant, etc. and an edge is just a representation of a connection between two things.
In the case of the internet each node in the graph might be a computer. Your computer, my computer, your phone, a router, an internet enabled thermostat, you name it. An edge in this case would be a direct connection (we’ll see what this means a little later) between any two nodes (devices).
However, we’re missing one element that is essential to making the internet work, protocols. Imagine you have two people talking to each other. In this scenario one person is speaking in French while the other person is speaking in Hindi. Assuming that the person speaking French doesn’t speak Hindi and vice versa, their exchange would not be very productive. In order for this conversation to be more fruitful we need an agreed upon language, a set of protocols that allow the the information to be proceed in a meaningful way.
The world before the internet
Computers have been around a lot longer than the internet. In fact, the first general purpose electronic computer, i.e. one that could be reprogrammed to solve different problems, was developed here in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was built primarily to solve complex ballistic trajectories for the military and was later used to study the feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon, e.g. an atom bomb. Early computers were large, complex machines that were isolated in research institutes around the globe.
ARPANET
While these computers were a huge advancement in terms of computational power over hand calculations, the results of these calculations were still only kept locally. If you wanted to send the information to a colleague across town, you would still have to call them up, send a telegraph, or mail them results. Through out the 60’s researchers developed the theoretical and practical basis for sending information digitally (i.e. the protocols) and on October 29th 1969 ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) connected two computers between the UCLA and Stanford.
Over time the network grew to incorporate many computers. Above is a “map” of ARPANET. It shows all of the named computers in the network with connections between them. In this graph, each computer is a node, and the connections between computers are the edges. Notice that not every computer is connected to every other one. While at first the connection between UCLA and Stanford started out as direct, now it might make a couple of “hops” to connect between the two. Hence the network of networks.
As ARPANET grew, so did the complexity of the network and with it the need for more sophisticated protocols. In 1983, ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP set of protocols which still form the basis of the internet as we know it. Since then, many more protocols have been developed, adopted, and abandoned, the number and computing power of computers have grown exponentially, and we are no longer tied directly to a copper cable in order access the internet, but the basic structure remains same: computers talking to each other using a set of agreed upon rules.