The Internet started from humble beginnings: the need of universities to exchange files between their staff members and students more easily. The military also had a role in the sense that they wanted to decentralize their computer systems so it couldn’t all be wiped out by a single attack. The history of this research is to an extent the history of the internet
It comes as no surprise therefore that the bulk of research was initially carried out by the universities. They started writing protocols to enable file sharing between their computers. Anyone who had a personal computer during the ’80s will know that different computers didn’t necessarily speak each other’s language during those early days.
These early, quite primitive, networks were solely for the use of computer experts and scientists. It was not accessible to the man in the street, but only to staff members at the universities and selected advanced students. The whole idea centered around file sharing.
One such file sharing service was called FTP (File Transfer Protocol). It has been used for a couple of decades now and is still in use today. If you have your own website it’s highly likely you have also used FTP to upload your website files to the server of your hosting company.
The development at the universities during the 1980s and 1990s were mainly concerned with the development of a menu system, so anyone could easily get a list of the available files and then make a choice by either typing in the file name or selecting it.
A huge step in the right direction was when the scientists at the European Laboratory for Partical Physics (located in Switzerland, in short called CERN) developed the basic principles of what we call http today during 1991. Hypertext transfer protocol is in layman’s terms the ability to create links in a page of information so anyone clicking on that link will be taken to that other page. This is still what makes the web work today.
The next major step ahead was when the web browser was introduced during 1993. The first generally available browser was called Mosaic. Suddenly anyone could log on to the ‘Net and access vast numbers of files simply by clicking on the hyperlinks embedded in a file. You could now also type in a domain name in the address bar, for example that of your university, and go to all the files they wanted to share with the word in a few seconds. Soon after Mosaic, Netscape introduced their Navigator and Microsoft followed soon afterwards with Internet Explorer.
Initially the web was for non-commercial use only, but during the ‘nineties commercial networks started to proliferate. These companies offered services like email and web browsing, suddenly putting users from all over the world in contact with each other. The history of the Internet is still being written every day, as new developments like browser add-on continue to change the environment in which we surf the web.
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