The Internet was created in 1969 by scientists working for ARPA. ARPA stands for
advanced research projects agency, and was formed to create a network of
computers that could save information in the event of a nuclear attack. UCLA,
Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University
of Utah in Salt Lake City were the first ARPANET locations. The ARPANET is what
is now called the Internet. The plan was unprecedented: A professor at UCLA, and
his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and
try to send it some data. They would start by typing "login," and
asking by telephone if the letters appeared on the far-off monitor. On their
first attempt, the “L” and “O” were transmitted successfully, but after
they typed the letter “G” the system crashed. From 1969 to 1983 a lot of
different packet switching schemes were tried and TCP/IP is what grew OUT of
ARPANET, not what started ARPANET. During most of the seventies, the protocol
was generally referred to as just the Network Control Protocol or NCP. The term
Internet was probably first applied to a 1973 research program that culminated
in a demonstration system in 1977. It demonstrated networking through various
mediums, including satellite, radio, telephone, ethernet, etc. using packet
switching. And this formed the roots of the Transmission Control Protocol and
Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). But it was not until 1983 that all nodes on ARPANET
were required to use TCP/IP to connect to it. Also in 1983, the Department of
Defense moved the unclassified portions of the Data Defense Network to create
MILLET. Then in January 1983, the ARPA Internet first appears and operation was
passed to the Defense Communications Agency. The first operating,
non-experimental, real live Internet with a capital network, was a military
network with a couple of hundred computers connected to it. Universities and the
general public were not welcome on the ARPANET. It was a network for Department
of Defense contractors and military sites. Then a group of military contractors
with strong ties to business and universities not on the MILLET were constantly
in a situation where many of their peers were not on the Net while they were on.
They began campaigning for access for other researchers. In 1984 the National
Science Foundation established an office for networking. a number of
universities and research groups actually did get access to ARPANET. In 1993,
Tim Lee created an interface to the World Wide Web he called Mosaic. The NSF
actually funded further development of a Macintosh and Microsoft Windows version
of Mosaic through a grant to the University. The first Microsoft Windows version
appeared about November of 1993. The Mosaic Web Browser put a pretty face on the
Internet. You could navigate the World Wide Web by clicking on links with the
mouse. More importantly, it allowed users to add "players" for sound,
video clips, or anything else they wanted to add. Today, advanced Mosaic
browsers such as Netscape have added other functions quite beyond World Wide
Web, including electronic mail. Electronic mail, or E-mail as it is commonly
called, was invented by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 as a way of sending messages of
the Internet to other users on-line. His program for sending E-mail was called
SNDMSG, which stands for send message. Now E-mail has grown so much that next
year people will send an estimated 6 trillion messages. A new use for the
Internet that is influencing the lives of many Internet users is the creation of
E-wrestling leagues. E-wrestling is a type of game in which you create wrestling
matches over E-mail. You can challenge other members of your E-fed (a group of
members in your league) by posting messages on the message board. The other
member will then respond to your challenge by writing back on the message board.
If the commissioner approves of the match then he will send an E-mail to the two
members telling when the match will take place. There are two ways a
commissioner can create matches, depending on the rules of your federation. One
way is to write out the entire match. This takes a long time and the results are
based on the opinion of the commissioner. The other way involves using a
computer to decide the winner. My federation uses “Zeus”, a computer program
found on the Internet, to simulate the matches. The good thing about this type
of match is it can be made quickly, the matches are fair and based on wrestlers
attributes, and many gimmick matches can be downloaded off of the Net. However
the match is made, the next step is for the commissioner to post the match
results on the federation Web page. To run a good E-fed, the commissioner needs
to have a good knowledge of the Internet and knowledge of pro-wrestling.
E-wrestling is becoming very popular. There are over ****** different E-feds on
the Internet, some with more than one hundred members. As the Internet and
pro-wrestling continue to grow in popularity, E-wrestling can expect a similar
increase. This is why in the future E-wrestling will have an impact on many more
people. In conclusion, the Internet has grown from its humble beginnings to a
massive network of networks. The Internet’s rich history will always be
preserved through the hundreds of sites on the Web dedicated to Internet
history. The Internet will continue to grow, and with this growth will come new
advances in technology. After 30 years the Internet is still not finished. It
will keep getting bigger and better, until one day when a nuclear bomb destroys
the Earth, killing the entire population, but at least our software, hardware,
information, and data will be safe.