The History of the Internet Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The History of the Internet - Research Paper Example At the height of Cold War, in 1962, the American Government was devising a plan that would enable the military to maintain its command and control system in an event of nuclear attack on the US. The RAND Corporation was given the task to conduct research and studies to find how the US army could maintain its command and control system if any of US cities come under nuclear attack. After due deliberation and diversified studies, Rand Paul Baran from RAND Corporation submitted his final proposal for a Packet Switched Network (Ruthfield 1995). ARPA, a branch of US department of defense ARPANET awarded a contract to BBN to develop a decentralized architecture network. BBN constructed physical network linking four locations University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. According to the record, the network was connected through a 50 Kbps circuits on wire (Ruthfield 1995). By 1973, it was established that besides ARPANET other networks have come into a successful existence like National Physical Laboratory in England and the scientific network CYCLADES in France. Undoubtedly, these different networks with different approaches are the foundation of our modern internet. CYCLADES, being a commercial network, had many commercial users who began transferring data from one user to the other. Here Packet switching was born (Dave n.d). In 1976, Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe developed Ethernet, which was a crucial invention to moving data faster through a coaxial cable. Following, Package Satellite Project, SATNET came into existence which connected United States with Europe thus bringing about the first intercontinental Internet in the history (Dave n.d). The same year ARPANET started working on a protocol, later to be called, TCP/IP to bring together different networks without interfering their basic structure. With the invention of TCP/IP protocol it became possible to connect