History of the Internet PowerPoint

With the cold war at full force, the drive for better technology, especially computer communications, was at the forefront of the government’s needs. In the late 1950s the Soviet Union was able to launch Sputnik, a great technological feat, that frightened many leaders in the western hemisphere. With their eyes set on beating the Soviets to the moon, the need for more powerful computers that were able to communicate with each was higher than ever.

During the 1960s the development of timesharing helped cut down the time it took for people to get answers to queries that they were posing to computers. This was done using terminals in which people would type in their queries and receive an answer in just a few seconds, which considerably quicker than with the use of punch cards. Bob Taylor of ARPA requested funds to build a computer network that would link separate computers together so that one terminal could access more than one machine. Taylor’s idea and development project would change the world forever.

By the end of 1969, all four sites (UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah) were connected on the ARPA Net. There were 18 total mainframe computers on the network, once everything was setup. Now that everything was connected and working properly, the development of the next major advancement was underway, email. Email changed the way people communicated both on the ARPA Net and the years following.

With the use of the network well underway more and more networks took shape, and soon networks such as local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs) were formed to help schools and businesses throughout the country. Each new network however was like a foreign country compared to each other. Devices in each network only knew how to communicate on their own network, not to others. This is where TCP/IP protocol came in and added the capability for computers to communicate across networks. With TCP/IP networks could now interact with each other and this allowed for the modern-day internet, as we know it, to be born.

Overall, while the internet was initially developed for the purposes of government use during the cold war, it soon developed into something the public could not live without. The amount of knowledge, information, and communications that could be shared was unimaginable. Without the development of the initial networks, like the ARPA Net, we would not have the ability to communicate as fast as we do today. Finally, the development of the internet single handedly changed the world forever and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.