History of the Internet

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ASSIGNMENT 1

Development of the Internet

E-Commerce, BTEC National Diploma in Computing, year 1

To:                Adam Smith

From:                Marina Guseva

Date:                31 October 2002

History of the Internet

The global communications network has come a long way since 1969, when a few room-sized machines connected four universities in America, to today where the internet underpins corporate networking.

In 1957 The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In response, the United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military. They were trying to figure out an important strategic problem: they needed a military network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control.

Communicational network of the day was chained point-to-point which meant that each link was dependent on the link before it. This is when an idea of a complex network connection was conceived, the new structure would allow information to find its own way to the destination point even if some part of the network would be destroyed.

1961 

In July Leonard Kleinrock publishes the first paper on packet switching theory, which forms the basis for the creation of the Internet.

1965

Ted Nelson invents the term Hypertext to describe links to other texts embedded in a text. 25 years later Tim Berners-Lee makes hypertext available to all network users with his World Wide Web project.

1969

In April, 1969, the first RFC (Request for Comments) document, which launches a series of technical publications about the Internet, is realised.

The installation of the first node of ARPANET was done on 2 September 1969. By the end of 1969 the network consisted of four Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputers each with 12K of memory, connected by 50Kbps leased lines.

The first message sent 2 October, 1969, laid the foundation for the internet, according to UCLA, which is behind the birthday event. The first message, an attempt to log in to a remote site, was only successful in sending two characters before the system crashed.

1971

The ARPANET grows to 23 hosts connecting universities and government research centers around the country.

1972

The first e-mail program was created by Ray Tomlinson.

ARPANET was currently using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This allowed communications between hosts running on the same network.

1973

Development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP; it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other. The ARPANET goes international with connections to University College in London, England and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway.

1974

Telnet, the pocket-switching network was set up by Bolt, Beranek & Newman.

1977

In November, 1977, the first three-network demonstration takes place.

1979

The first USENET newsgroup was established by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, two grad students at Duke University, and Steve Bellovin at the University of North Carolina. Users from all over the world join these discussion groups to talk about the net, politics, religion and thousands of other subjects.

Join now!

1983

On January 1st, every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. TCP/IP became the core Internet protocol and replaced NCP entirely.

Domain Name System (DNS) was developed. This allowed packets to be directed to a domain name, which would be translated by the server database into the corresponding IP number. This made it much easier for people to access other servers, because they no longer had to remember numbers.

1987

The number of Internet hosts exceeds 10,000.

1990

Merit, IBM and MCI formed a not for profit corporation called ANS, Advanced Network & Services, which ...

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The structure of the report is quite good, as it has a little abit it's background and it's set out as an timeline, which gives a certain year and the developments of the Internet. The report states technical terms such as 'DoD' and ARPA', where the reports explains what these terms means and in-depth. Further on within the report, the student uses the term 'C2C' (Consumer To Consumer) and explains this term well. Their have provided the example of eBay, to allow the reader to understand with ease. The sections 'C2C', 'B2B' and 'B2C' are all described well and are in-depth, alongside a suitable example.

The report bullet points a number of improvements which could be implemented by eCommerce websites to improve their revenue streams. This is quite basic, and for high marks the student would need to justify each reason. For example, being able to take orders from across the world, allows the business to receive orders from any location, rather than one location using their store within the high-street. Thus, this is a more effective method of selling products. On the flip side, the report states how intermediaries are effected due to eCommerce, and this section is in-depth and detailed. This is due to that the background understanding is quite high, and the student uses the case study of Amazon.com to back up their background knowledge.

The report states how the internet was created and set-up and gives an accurate timeline of any developments that has occurred though-out the years. In addition, the report states how the Internet has had its effect on businesses, which is in-detail and discusses how this is being used by a number of businesses in order to generates sales via eCommerce.