Internet was born 43 years ago. There are some big events in the history of Internet development. In my opinion, most of the big events happened at the first five years, i.e, from 1969-1974.
1969 : ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet. The first ARPANET transmission was between Stanford Research Institute and UCLA on 29th, October 1969. The first message sent out was "Login", but the connection was broken when typing the character 'g'.
1969 : Unix
Many people know UNIX today, it is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Dennis Ritchie who was dead last year.
1970: BBN and IMP
BBN is the builder of the first IMP,(Interface Message Processor). On 30th, August 1969, the world's first IMP was shipped to UCLA, on 1st October, the second IMP was shipped to Stanford Research Institute, then we have the first ARPANET transmission mentioned above. The IMP software and the ARPANET protocol are discussed in RFC 1.
1971 : Email
Ray Tomlinson implemented the first Email system in 1971, and he used the @ sign to separate the username and computer name(Later computer name becomes domain name).
1971 : Project Gutenberg and eBook
In 1971, a project named Project Gutenberg which influenced the later world was launched, many people don't know the project name until today. Gutenberg is devoted to make the public books in the world be electronic and free to use. Gutenberg is considered to be the beginning of digital library and eBook.
The person on the left in the following picture is the founder of the project Gutenberg, Michael S. Hart. In 1971, Hart was a student of UIUC, with the help of his friends, he could use the Xerox System V mainframe computer in material research lab of UIUC and luckily he gained valuable computer time. He chose to use his computer time for information distribution. Hart related that after his account was created on July 4, 1971, he had been trying to think of what to do with it and had seized upon a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, which he had been given at a grocery store on his way home from watching fireworks that evening. He typed the text into the computer but was told that it would be unacceptable to transmit it to numerous people at once via e-mail Thus, to avoid crashing the system, he made the text available for people to download instead.
What happened next is that we can read eBooks and visit digital libraries conveniently now,. In September 2011, he was dead, before Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs.
1972: CYCLADES
CYCLADES is the ARPANET of France, French government sponsored the CYCLADES research through INRIA. Although CYCLADES didn't survive, one important principle of Internet was born here: The host, not the network should be responsible for reliability of the data transmission. Later TCP achieved this. Now CYCLADES is still considered to be one of the pioneer systems which influenced the development of Internet.
1973: The first connection across Atlantic and the popularity of Email.
The ARPANET connection was established between US and the University College of London in UK. In the same year, Email took 75% of the ARPANET traffic.
1974: TCP/IP
This year some proposal proposed to connect all ARPANET like networks together to form a "Inter-network". This inter-network has no central controls, all transmissions conformed to one specific transmission protocol. This proposal is RFC675 and this specific transmission control protocol is today's TCP/IP
Source :http://blog.jobbole.com/22158/
