Digital Age: Digital Technology: The Internet and Networking

The Internet & Networking

• Overview:  Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the government, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying the Internet. Its history is complex and involves many aspects - technological, organizational, and community. A major initial motivation for both the ARPANET and the Internet was resource sharing - for example allowing users on the packet radio networks to access the time sharing systems attached to the ARPANET.
  The original paper by Robert Kahn on the Internet described one protocol, called TCP, which provided all the transport and forwarding services in the Internet. 
  
  Kahn had intended that the TCP protocol support a range of transport services. This model worked fine for file transfer and remote login applications, but some of the early work on advanced network applications, in particular packet voice in the 1970s, made clear that in some cases packet losses should not be corrected by TCP, but should be left to the application to deal with. Kahn decided to develop a new version of the protocol which could meet the needs of an open-architecture network environment. This protocol would eventually be called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).
  
  As the network grew larger, it became clear that the sometime ad hoc procedures used to manage the network would not scale. In 1987 it became clear that a protocol was needed that would permit the elements of the network, such as the routers, to be remotely managed in a uniform way. Several protocols for this purpose were proposed, including Simple Network Management Protocol or SNMP.
  
  In the last few years, we have seen a new phase of commercialization. Originally, commercial efforts mainly comprised vendors providing the basic networking products, and service providers offering the connectivity and basic Internet services. This has been tremendously accelerated by the widespread and rapid adoption of browsers and the World Wide Web technology, allowing users easy access to information linked throughout the globe.

More...............................  A Brief History of the Internet