Net Basics: History - one of the articles published by Lyndon Cerejo

On the first day of school, a kindergarten teacher asked her class where milk came from. Only one boy mustered the courage to answer - "We get milk from the door every morning". Don't laugh it off - there are people today, well into their 30s, who think that the Net was developed by Microsoft or Netscape. So while they boast on one hand about what all the Net has to offer, their fundaes go for a gol when asked a few detailed questions about the Net.

The Internet saw the light of day a couple of years before I did - way back in the early 70s. That was the period when US and USSR weren't the best of friends. Those were the days when PCs didn't exist, and a computer meant a noise-making gigantic box of blinking lights that occupied a whole floor or sometimes an entire building. The US Department of Defense relied on such computers (mainframes) a lot those days. But the paranoia existed - bombing of one mainframe would make the whole system go for a toss. They started developing a decentralised computer network that would be bomb-proof. In such a network, a bomb attack would at the most disable a few computers, but the others would be able to carry on unaffected, even find alternate routes of communicating with each other. They succeeded.

Over that decade, many research agencies and universities joined the network. It was then that the brains behind the network realised the need to modify the technology to allow unlimited growth, and set a few communication standards. This done, the Net started growing globally - no longer restricted to the US. In the early 90s restrictions on commercial usage were removed, opening the doors to business.

Computers on the Internet are physically connected to one another via cable, standard telephone lines, leased lines, fiber optics, or satellite links. Any computer on the Internet can communicate with another through these physical connections, using a common language, called TCP-IP. Each computer on the Internet has a unique address that others use to communicate with that computer. So when you need to get or send information to a computer anywhere in the world, the information is actually routed through a series of computers till it reaches its destination.

So, the next time anyone tries to give you gyan about Netscape creating the Net, laugh it off and tell them what I've just told you !