Have you ever just sat back and asked yourself what you’d do without the internet? I know I have. For me, it’s usually a pretty gloomy picture. I’d have no way to do my business, a harder time getting hold of my bros, and pretty much everything else. Today, we use the internet to do everything from monitoring our health to meeting chicks to getting customers. But do we really know how the internet came to be? How can we appreciate it unless we know how it evolved and why that was so important?
The Internet in the Old Days
About half a century ago, computer scientists and researchers were the only people who even considered a universal way to communicate with each other using waves and computers. By 1969, only the US military had a prototype internet, which universities and private companies worked on to get the mother of the internet: the ARPANET.
For a while, ARPANET was great. It was adopted in the US and Europe. The net ran at 56Kbps, and after a while became too congested to use, so it was upgraded to the 1.544Mbps in the ‘80s. By 1993, the internet, now called the NSFNET, had a speed of 45Mbps, and could support multiple systems from multiple institutions. It was the first version of the internet as we know it.
The Internet Today
Today, over 1.5 billion people own internet-connected computers. We no longer use one internet source (that’s what Internet Service Providers are for) and the internet is no longer centralized- it works on distributed instead. Gone are the days when you had to be hooked to a desktop to connect to the internet, not since Apple put the first internet-enabled phone on the market. And more importantly, we can use the internet to do everything – commercially and socially – folks couldn’t use the internet for anything other than research back in the old days. Indeed, the internet has changed.
