Bearing in mind that we constantly talk about the news and improvements that digital marketing and technology bring us, we believe that it is a good time to dedicate a post to what seems essential to us today: the Internet. Today we treat the internet history, starting by taking into account that it was born, at the time, as a military project to be able to ensure communications between different points in the United States in the event of a major attack, but, luckily, it was never used in this situation and today it is a fundamental tool for many of us that has changed the way we act, communicate and work.
We are going to see step by step how the stages of this process were.
History of the Internet: Index
How the Internet was born: The Cold War
First of all, let’s put ourselves in context. To begin the history of the Internet, we go back to the 1947 when the Cold War begins, confrontation started at the end of World War II. As you well know, this is a conflict caused by the tension between the western-capitalist bloc led by the United States and the eastern-communist bloc then led by the Soviet Union.
In it, two opposing models fought to implant their method and ideology throughout the world. The reason for calling this confrontation the “cold war” is because they never met directly but, in return, they were involving the rest of the countries with the aim of expanding their model.
After a long period of fighting, during the last stage, the Soviet economic model stagnated and the United States was strengthened militarily which then positioned him in a favorable situation. In 1985 Gorbachev became Secretary General and he was the one who promoted a series of reforms known as the perestroika (restructuring). After several approaches, in late 1989 Gorbachev and Reagan’s successor George HW Bush declared the Cold War over. This was followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as such.
History of the Internet: ARPA
In 1957 the USSR launched the first artificial satellite in history, Sputnik 1, and, in this context, organized in the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency (U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency) known as HARP and linked to the Department of Defense. This was created in response to the technological and military challenges of the then USSR and, a decade later, it would be considered the organization that laid the foundations of what would be known as the Internet decades later.
Over the next few years great progress was made. In 1962, , a researcher for the United States Government, presented a communications system that, through computers connected to a decentralized network, was immune to external attacks. In the event that one or several nodes were destroyed, the others could continue to communicate without any problem.
This project was based on the work of the person who, a year earlier, had published from MIT the packet switching theory that raised the feasibility of using this revolutionary technique. This theory is based on the fact that all the information that comes out of a device is divided into blocks to be transmitted over the network and these blocks are called packets.
Work continued to establish a network that could be accessed from anywhere in the world, which they named the “galactic network.” In 1965 a TX2 computer in Massachusetts was connected to a Q-32 in California by means of a switched telephone line although of low speed and still limited. It worked and then allowed to work in a connected way but, as it is easy to imagine today, the system was inadequate.
History of the Internet: ARPANET
In the following years, research continues until 1969 Michael Ellieconsidered one of the pioneers of the Internet, get into UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) and joins ARPA with a research grant. At the end of this year it manages to connect the computer at UCLA with another at SRI (Stanford Research Institute).
Shortly after, There were already four interconnected American universities. This network was called ARPANET and the objective of this development was to maintain communications in case of war in the face of the situation of uncertainty and fear of the moment. It was quite a revolution since until then they only had a centralized network that was considered very insecure in case of war because the system could be easily blocked.
In 1970 ARPANET is consolidated. Ray Tomlinson lays the groundwork for what is now known as email. This need arises because the developers needed a coordination mechanism that they covered with this system. Remember that recently we talked about him and his outstanding role in (with video included).
The network went from the military agencies to the universities and defense projects of the country with increasing force. Scientists used and developed it to also allow sharing opinions and being able to establish collaborations in works. In 1972 it already integrated 50 universities and research centers that were distributed throughout the United States. A year later, ARPANET already established connections with other countries such as England and Norway.
With the boom in the commercialization of computers, the number of connected computers was increasing and from the 80s other networks appeared which, as we can imagine, caused chaos due to the great variety of formats of the connected computers. Once it is unified and consolidated, the Internet is born.
History of the Internet: From ARPANET to WWW
When was the Internet born? (at least massively)
is the year 1983 which is normally marked as the year the Internet was born. It was then that the United States Department of Defense decided to use it in its Arpanet network, thus creating the Arpa Internet network. Over the years it was left with the name of only “Internet”.
March 12, 1989 Tim Berners Lee he first described the hypertext transfer protocol that would give rise to the first web using three new resources: HTML, HTTP and a program called Web Browser. A year later, the Internet was born in a closed way within CERN, and in August 1991Finally, users outside CERN began to be able to access that information.
The World Wide Web grew rapidly: in 1993 there were only 100 World Wide Web Sites and by 1997 there were more than 200,000. And from then on, the exciting history of the Internet continues to this day. What a job! With how easy everything seems 😉
What does the Internet mean?
The name of the Internet comes from a need that, precisely, was born to solve: to speed up communications. And the Internet is nothing more than an abbreviation for the terms Network and Interconnect. In any case, we could say that the Internet is an interconnected global network, something very similar to what the famous WWW, world wide web.
History of the Internet: The adaptation of business
To situate ourselves and put ourselves in context, I want to share an example that I read in the book «Your digital marketing plan» by Mau Santambrosio and Patricia de Andrés, in which they explained The case of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I think that is a good example in this article on the history of the Internet.
This encyclopedia, in 1990, was a benchmark in its field. Its 32 volumes had a cost close to 1,400 dollars and, in the United States alone, some 100,000 encyclopedias were sold each year. Six years later, with the disconcerting arrival of the Internet and the great change it brought, this figure dropped to 3,000. Those years were tough. Things were changing and your product had to change if it was going to survive.
In March 2012after 244 years, the end of an era for the company was announced: they would no longer print the paper version from the encyclopedia. Then? Did they close the company? Well no. They anticipated and were able to foresee that this moment could come, so in 2012 its printed edition already only represented 1% of the business and the company had already been presenting profits for 9 years, so those previous years were preparing for such a moment. This case seems to me a great example to understand how complex and important it has been to adapt to the digital sector and especially difficult for such traditional companies and with a product as established as in this case that we are commenting on.
As the late Umberto Eco would say: «Today, with the Internet, we can know things that our ancestors took a lifetime to know«.
The growing number of internet users in the world
Year after year, the number of Internet users in the world increases exponentially, a figure that has been boosted by the great penetration of mobile devices.
According to data from the Digital 2022 report, carried out by We Are Social and Hootsuite, the number of internet users in the world has reached 4,950 million people, which represents 62.5% of the population (7.910 million people).
In January 2022, unique users from mobile devices reached 67.1% of the population in the world, that is, 5,310 million people, which represents 1.8% more compared to the data in January 2021, an increase of 95 million users.
And what are the ? The Top 10 is made up of:
- Google com
- youtube.com
- facebook.com
- twitter.com
- instagram.com
Countries with the highest internet penetration
In detail, this report shows us the ranking of , and this time the United Arab Emirates with 99% penetration, share leadership with (99%) and Ireland (99%). In this edition Spain rises three positions compared to the results of the previous report when arriving at the 14th place with 94% penetration.
The countries with the lowest internet penetration are North Korea (0.1%), Central African Republic (7.1%) and Eritrea (8%).
The era of Social Networks
We could say that the beginning mid 90’s with the creation of GeoCities, in which users were recommended to create their web pages and install them in “neighborhoods”, where they would have a relationship with users from the same neighborhood.
Anyway, the first social network like the ones we have today was sixdegrees.com which is no longer accessible. Following the theory of 6 degrees of separation, sixdegrees allowed its users to connect by invitation with other users creating a community, and allowed them to send messages to each other and see when they connected. It had more than 1 million users, although it disappeared in 2001.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube
Over time, social networks have evolved, being created in the year 2002 Friendster, a social network for video game lovers. In the year 2003 MySpace, Linkedin (social network in the employment environment) and in the year 2004 A Harvard undergraduate named created the…
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