How it came together
- 1960sIndependently in two countries, researchers propose splitting messages into parts and sending them along different routes.
- 1969Four university nodes are connected. The first command sent cuts off at the third letter.
- 1983Networks adopt a common set of protocols, turning separate networks into one.
- 1989At a research center, someone proposes a system of linked documents - what people today often confuse with the internet itself.
The first milestone illustrates the main principle. A regular phone call occupied the entire line. Packet switching lets one line handle many connections at once: parts of different messages travel interleaved and are reassembled at the recipient's end.
The third milestone marks the moment when the internet became the internet. Before that, separate incompatible networks existed. A common set of rules let them connect and allowed new networks to join without being rebuilt.
Two common misconceptions
The network was created so communication could survive a nuclear attack.
Resilience to breaks was indeed a feature of packet switching, and such considerations were discussed in one early paper. But the project that grew into the network was meant to let research centers share expensive computers.
The second misconception is confusing the internet with the web. The internet is a network and a set of rules for transmitting data; the web is one service built on top of it, invented twenty years later. Email, file transfers and much more worked before it.
The web is what made the network mainstream. It added three simple things: a page address, a link and a browser. Users no longer needed to know commands, and within a few years the number of people connected had increased severalfold.
It is also worth noting that the web's creator and his institute chose not to patent the invention. The open standard allowed anyone to make their own browsers and servers, and that - not technical superiority - ensured its spread.
What task did the network grow out of?
How is the internet different from the web?
Sources
- The network grew out of a project to share computing resources
- the move to a common set of protocols took place in 1983, while a system of linked hypertext documents was proposed in 1989 and spread without patent restrictions
Next in the “Inventions” series
2 articles in full on the site, 3 more in the app
