Well, this blog is intended to provide you with some background information about the Web, so let's take a very brief look (promise ;-) at the beginning of the Internet. My apologies to all historians, I will simplify the story a little bit.

The Internet was originally created by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as the "ARPANET". As you might have guessed, the DARPA is a sub-organization of the United States Department of Defense (DoD). The really new thing about the ARPANET was that it was a packet-switched network meaning that information is split into a number of packets when traveling from A to B where each packet might take a different route. BTW, the first two nodes were UCLA and SRI International, connected in the fall of 1969 - both located in California.

(Note: This is where the term "routing" comes from that you might have already heard about.)

The reason why the researchers used this new packet-switched approach was the idea that if you had many nodes in such a network, the packet could use many different routes. The advantage would be that in the case of a catastrophic event such as, e.g., a nuclear strike, data could still be sent across the country as long as there was at least a single possible route left. In other words, the network was more robust and fault tolerant than previous so-called circuit-switched networks.

Although the ARPANET was using a simpler network protocol (NCP), it was already based on the same basic principles as the Internet Protocol (IP). Still, it took as long as 1983 to switch all existing network nodes over to the new TCP/IP protocol stack (more about this in the next post). The final basic step that later lead to the inventions of all the cool services today (from the Web to Skype and Twitter) was taken in 1988 when the United States finally opened the network to commercial interests.

Thank you USA :-)