Internet

The Internet (note the capital 'I'; just as there are many 'white houses', but only one 'White House', there are many 'internets', but only one 'Internet' - and like the above example, 'internet' and 'Internet' have different meanings, so changing the capitalization changes the meaning) is an internet (the short form of the term internetwork) which is the world's dominant information network.

It uses the TCP/IP protocol suite for communication.

What later became today's Internet was started (in the late 1970's) as an experiment in having computers communicate across an internet of multiple disparate physical networks; DARPA back then didn't really fund operational systems, just research that would produce things likely to be of interest to the military. A big step was in January, 1986, when the DoD mandated that the ARPANET (at that point, the dominant wide area network among US academic institutions) convert from the NCP protocol suite to TCP/IP. After several years of that (in 1990 or so), as LANs started to appear in organizations of all types (educational, research, business, etc), people decided it would be good to hook them all together so they could interact using the network; this led to the next stage of the nascent Internet. After that, social media companies got started, and that led to basically everyone starting to use it.

It is to some degree a direct descendant of the ground-breaking ARPANET, but only in the senses that i) its early dominant application protocols (TELNET, FTP, and email) were direct clones of those of the ARPANET; ii) that the technical community which created it was an overlap/descendant of the one which produced the ARPANET; and iii) that the document series which specifies the protocols (the Request for Comments series) is a continuous whole. (See the TCP/IP article for more on TCP/IP's technical antecedents.)

See also

• Internet Engineering Task Force
• TCP and Internet Meetings

Further reading

• David D. Clark, The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols, Proceedings SIGCOMM 1988
  • David D. Clark, The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols - later revision
• Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, David D. Clark, End-To-End Arguments in System Design, ACM Transactions in Computer Systems, Volume 2, Number 4, November 1984, pp. 277-288

External links

• Architectural Principles of the Internet (RFC-1958)
• Will The Real "End-End Principle" Please Stand Up?
• INWG and the Conception of the Internet: An Eyewitness Account
• A Brief History of the Internet
• The “hidden” Prehistory of European Research Networking - A wonderfully detailed history of the spread of the Internet in Europe
• Netizens: On the History and Impact of the Net
• Born in a Van: Happy 40th Birthday to the Internet! - spells 'Internet' incorrectly, but otherwise pretty good