On January 1, 1983, the internet was born.
Kinda. Really, that was when the internet we know of happened. The proto-internet (really, the internet to be) was much different from what we used today. The most popular and well known version of the “early internet” was something called ARPANET. ARPANET was the babysteps of the internet; it was small, complex, and really limited in its usage. It also didn’t sound nearly as cool or interconnected as the “Internet.” ARPANET was also primarily a military installation, used by high ranking officials.
The internet before the internet began mainly in the ’60s (wow, that’s retro). Computers of the ’60s were huge, clunky, and kinda looked like something that you’d see on the set of Star Trek, and these computers used an incredibly complex and weird “language” to talk to each other over long distances using a base computer to connect to. From there, they’d all relay messages back and forth using that computer (acting as a “server”) as a middleman, getting information relayed back and forth. It was usually pretty slow, and the communications back and forth were short.
Pretty soon after the creation of ARPANET, smaller academic organizations would start creating their own variants of ARPANET. The problem with all of these different networks was that they were unable to communicate with each other; if you used ARPANET, you could ONLY contact people who also used ARPANET (or a derivative of it). They were numerous, and none of them spoke the others’ languages.
This leads us to the beginning. Of this post, of the story of the internet, and of thousands of really terrible Geocities websites (coming up soon!); on January 1, 1983, ARPANET and most other preexisting network systems officially switched over to the Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). This allowed these networks to communicate with each other for the first time. This was, for all intents and purposes, the VERY first ever use of something we’d consider the internet.
The rest is pretty recent history. With the establishment of the TCP/IP system, computer networks now had unlimited and unmitigated access to each other; it was an entirely new realm of unprecedented interconnectivity: for people who are reading this on the toilet, that means everyone had the ability to talk to anyone else! All of a sudden, the world became a lot more open, even if the actual internet community was small.
But here’s the best part! That’s just the beginning. The internet you and I know comes way later. And that’s a story you don’t wanna miss.
Part 2 coming next week. Be on the lookout!