Internet History

There are many sites on the Web with timelines and discussions of Internet history. Up until about 1990, they echo what we've learned from Where Wizards Stay Up Late. In the early 1990s, the Net ``took hold'' and rapidly transitioned from a plaything of scientists to a critical national infrastructure.

Among the factors driving the growth of the Internet in the 1980s were the creation of the government-funded NSFNET for research and education, the emergence of low-cost PCs, workstations and local-area networks (Ethernet LANs), public release of the Berkeley Unix software (BSD) incorporating the TCP/IP protocol suite, commercial BSD-based Unix offerings from a multitude of vendors, and development of new IP-based services for resource sharing, such as network file systems (e.g., Sun Microsystem's NFS).

Among the factors driving the growth of the Internet in the 1990s were the emergence of the World-Wide Web, transitioning the Internet backbone to commercial transit providers, the increasing availability of low-cost broadband technologies to bring IP connectivity over the ``last mile'' to homes and businesses over cable and telephone lines (DSL), and Al Gore.

Readings

Internet History

Internet history. This summarizes and extends the material from Wizards; read the material at the end outlining the institutions ``governing'' the Net today.

View from the future

Hobbes' Internet timeline. Just skim it; lots of links for further explorations.

USENET and its history. Just read enough to figure out what USENET is and isn't, and how it came about (go Blue Devils).

Other histories and timelines for general interest.

Web History

WWW history, CERN's view of the birth of the WWW, and the original CERN concept proposal.

WWW: How it really happened

Infrastructure: Searching, DNS, etc.

A peek inside Google.
Politics of the Domain Name Service: the 1998 green paper proposing the way DNS is managed now.
US shuts down Somali Internet