ABSTRACT
A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE INTERNET
In 1969, the Internet was just a demonstration project linking up four university campuses in the USA, but it now boasts in excess of 300 million users across the world. It was supported by the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). The Internet was based on an original concept developed by the Rand Corporation in the early 1960s, and added to by bodies such as the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL). The objective of the research was to provide the USA with a communications network that would survive in the event of a nuclear conflagration. The project was codified into a set of protocols (eventually called TCP/IP) by Vinton Cerf during the mid-1970s, and deployed across all the interlinked networks in 1983. Growth between 1980 and 1987 shows numbers of hosts in the tens of thousands.
