InterNET Services history

Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA,4 starting in October 1962.

To explore this, in 1965 working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer in Mass. to the Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first (however small) wide-area computer network ever built.

APRANET was introduced in 1969 as the first operational packet switching network in the world.

The INWG was created at the October 1972 International Computer Communications Conference organized by Bob Kahn, et al, and Cerf was invited to chair this group.

The give and take was highly productive and the first written version of the resulting approach was distributed as INWG#39 at a special meeting of the International Network Working Group (INWG) at Sussex University in September 1973.

In 1976, Kleinrock published the first book on the ARPANET. It included an emphasis on the complexity of protocols and the pitfalls they often introduce.

TCP, which originally included the Internet protocol (IP), a global addressing mechanism that allowed routers to get data packets to their ultimate destination, formed the TCP/IP standard, which was adopted by the United States Department of Defense in 1980.

An unprecedented 1981 agreement between Farber, acting for CSNET and the NSF, and DARPA’s Kahn, permitted CSNET traffic to share ARPANET infrastructure on a statistical and no-metered-settlements basis.

By 1983, ARPANET was split to create a separate MILNET for national defense and military use.

In 1985–86 NSF funded the first five supercomputing centres—at Princeton University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, San Diego, the University of Illinois, and Cornell University.

In 1987 it became clear that a protocol was needed that would permit the elements of the network, such as the routers, to be remotely managed in a uniform way.

These new commercial capabilities accelerated the growth of the Internet, which as early as 1988 had already been growing at the rate of 100 percent per year.

10 The decommissioning of the ARPANET was commemorated on its 20th anniversary by a UCLA symposium in 1989.

When 'the internet' began accepting commercial traffic in the early 1990’s there was an agreement with commercial internet users that they had to honor the peering protocol of swapping data free of charge.

In 1993 federal legislation allowed NSF to open the NSFNET backbone to commercial users.

NSF’s privatization policy culminated in April, 1995, with the defunding of the NSFNET Backbone.

Cable residential broadband was introduced in 1996.

Jon Postel served as Director of the Computer Networks Division of the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California until his untimely death October 16, 1998.

By the year 2000, the ISP market looked very different from just five years before, with Earthlink, PSInet, Mindspring and UUNET ranking as the top four national internet service providers for businesses.

In 2005, WildBlue – the precursor to Exede, which later became Viasat Internet – was one of the first to offer this kind of service.

AT&T’s merger with Time Warner in 2016 only consolidated the already massive hold they had on the US internet market and was one of a string of deals that further placed control of the internet into fewer corporate hands.

In 2017, Viasat launched ViaSat-2, with even more capacity able to offer even faster speeds and greater data plans.

By 2020, approximately 4.5 billion people, or more than half of the world’s population, were estimated to have access to the Internet.