In a sense, the internet can be said to be the product of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In the United States, the 1960s was a very special era. In the early 1960 s, the Cuban nuclear missile crisis occurred and the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union warmed up. The threat of nuclear annihilation has become a hot topic in people's daily life. While the United States imposed a blockade on Cuba, the Vietnam War broke out and political crises occurred in many third world countries. Due to the stimulation of American federal funds and the influence of public fear, the "cold war in the laboratory" also began. It is generally believed that maintaining the leading position in science and technology will determine the outcome of the war. The progress of science and technology depends on the development of computer field. By the end of 1960s, every major federally funded research center, including purely commercial organizations and universities, had the latest computer equipment provided by the emerging computer industry in the United States. At the same time, the idea of sharing information in computer center interconnection has developed rapidly.
The U.S. Department of Defense believes that if there is only one centralized military command center, in case this center is destroyed by the nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union, the national military command will be paralyzed and the consequences will be unimaginable. Therefore, it is necessary to design such a decentralized command system consisting of decentralized command points. When some command points are destroyed, others can still work normally, and these scattered points can get in touch through some form of communication network.
To this end, the then US President Eisenhower held a long-term meeting of scientific and technological advisers and formally proposed to Congress the establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Ministry of National Defense-ARPA (ARPANET for short). The bureau began to study the establishment of a computer network that can still connect important domestic military bases and institutions in the event of a nuclear attack.
After investing a lot of manpower, material resources and financial resources, after nearly 10 years of exploration, in 1969, four sites, including UCLA and Stanford University Research Institute, realized historic connection, formed a computer network, and named it ARPAnet. In the same year, the first document seeking the opinions of network users appeared in the history of the Internet, which formed the main form of Internet publishing working documents to users all over the network, and laid the foundation for the open development model of the Internet.
At the beginning, ARPANET was placed under the protection of senior secrets of the US Department of Defense in terms of military requirements, and technically it did not have the conditions for external promotion. Subsequently, the main functions of the Internet came out one after another, including remote login, file transfer and e-mail, and they were widely used. 1973 also realized the first international connection between the United States and London, England.
From 65438 to 0972, the first international computer communication conference was held in Washington, USA. At the meeting, bob kane of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense demonstrated the ARPANET communication between 40 machines to more than 1000 delegates, which caused a sensation. However, the basic functions of the Internet, such as e-mail, can only be carried out between different nodes of ARPANET. The meeting decided to create a protocol to enable almost all computer networks in the world to communicate with each other. 1974, bob kane cooperated with Vinton Cerf of Stanford University and put forward the famous TCP/IP protocol.
IP is the communication protocol on the Internet, and TCP is the transmission control protocol. TCP/IP protocol specifies the data exchange format and transmission mode between all communication devices on the network, especially the hosts. TCP/IP is the basic protocol of Internet and the standard method of computer data encapsulation and addressing. In data transmission, it can be vividly understood that there are two envelopes.
Like envelopes, TCP and IP divide the information to be transmitted into several segments, each segment is stuffed into a TCP envelope, and the information with the segment number is recorded on the cover of the letter, and then the TCP envelope is stuffed into a large IP envelope and sent to the Internet. At the receiving end, TCP software package collects envelopes, extracts data, restores them in the order before sending, and checks them. If an error is found, TCP will request retransmission. Therefore, TCP/IP can transmit data almost error-free.
TCP/IP protocol is no longer regarded as a security technology, but an open communication protocol for the whole society. Therefore, in order to make their software and hardware products widely used on the Internet, many network companies have added support for TCP/IP protocol to their software and hardware products, which has gradually been recognized by the whole society. 1983, the University of California, Berkeley, introduced the UNIX operating system with TCP/IP protocol communication module. Since then, TCP/IP protocol has been recognized as the standard protocol of ARPANET by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it has been widely popular in the society, and finally the real Internet was born.
During this period, many important networks appeared. Wicksen University in the United States created a network dedicated to concentrated research on computer science, and then some units and scholars joined in to form a CS network. The University of North Carolina has established a computer network newsgroup to spread online news. Now, newsgroups have become the largest part of Internet users' tool set, and can provide all Internet users with the latest news from all over the world. City University of new york has also set up a bit network to spread the news.
At the same time, Tom Dzhanis specially designed a bulletin board system (Fide BBS) for personal computers. Subsequently, he established a network system-FIDE Network, which connected all Fide BBS through modems and telephone lines. Because this network is based on personal computers, and personal computers are all over the world, Fide network connects all kinds of users and becomes a very huge network in the Internet.
Connecting different networks together becomes "internetworking", which is called "Interconnect networks" in English or "Internet" for short. In the future, the whole interconnected network will be named "Internet".
In the experiment of 1969, the network has only four nodes, and the number of network nodes will increase continuously in the next 20 years. 1989 exceeded 65,438+10,000 units, and 1990 exceeded 300,000 hosts. It was also in 1990 that ARPANET, the predecessor of modern internet, completed its mission and withdrew from the historical stage.