Birthday of Internet ~ celebrating 30 years since born

New Year gets celebrated and people have reasons to do so…….  In one of the observations made, there are so many people who celebrate their birth day on 1st Jan, either by choice, fancying the date or due to the tendency of people to spoof real data when using some social networking sites.  Thus, on Social networking sites, one fines, many with 1st Jan as their birth days, perhaps it is easier to remember too………. For some reasons, the New Year’s day is referred as Every Person’s Birthday. 

There is another important thing that celebrated its birthday on 1st January 2013 – infact, 3 decades since it was born ~ the  Internet, a revolutionary and cheap communications system that has transformed the lives of billions of people across the world, turned 30 on Tuesday, 1st of Jan 2013.

When we grew up, nobody would have imagined or dreamt that so much of useful information would be available at the click of a mouse and that too free of cost………… A Great Revolution indeed.  The computer network officially began its technological revolution when it fully substituted previous networking systems on January 1 1983.   The history of the Internet began with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. The public was first introduced to the Internet when a message was sent from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock's laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), after the second piece of network equipment was installed at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). This connection not only enabled the first transmission to be made, but is also considered to be the first Internet backbone. This began the point-to-point communication between mainframe computers and terminals, expanded to point-to-point connections between computers and then early research into packet switching. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET,  Tymnet,  Telenet and more  were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks.

In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced. The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

Known as “flag day”,  on Jan 1, for  the first time the US Department of Defence (DoD)-commissioned Arpanet network fully switched to use of the Internet protocol suite (IPS) communications system. Using data “packet-switching”, the new method of linking computers paved the way for the arrival of the World Wide Web.  World has moved fast and now everyone is so dependent on ‘world wide web’ [www] and Internet.  Though there were systems and attempts to renew, by  January 1 1983, the substitution of the older system for the new Internet protocol had been completed and the Internet was born.

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee was then able to use it to host the system of interlinked hypertext documents he invented in 1989, known as the World Wide Web.  Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist is credited as  the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and on 25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student at the European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN), he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

2^nd Jan 2013.