How was the internet first invented without the internet?
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At its most basic level the internet is just one computer talk to another. So the founding ideas started in building the first network. You just need 2 computers, a connecting cable, and software that can send and receive information. Then it’s just a matter of scaling it up from there.
it started with a few computers in the same building, then several buildings on same campus, then buildings in same city (connected periodically via phone lines with modem devices).
even before internet and PC’s, they had “mainframe” computers than had multiple terminals in potentially different locations, which functioned like computers connected to a central server, so the concept was not completely new.
Why do you need interconnected computers to make interconnected computers?
You can design the hardware for the interconnection by hand or with a non-networked computer. Then make the equipment and connect the computer and you have the internet.
Take two computers. Run a wire between them. Boom, that’s an internet.
The clever part is figuring out how to connect two computers on the opposite sides of the country via existing telecoms infrastructure (i.e. telephone lines) and creating communications protocols that keep signals from getting crossed.
Internet was not *invented*, it is a concept defining a certain kind of computer communication network.
A network is connecting different computers to each other so they are able to communicate and exchange information. These can be classified in LAN, MAN and WAN. Local, Metropolitan and Wide Area Networks.
Such a network is operated by the same entity. (Company, University, Government, …)
*An* internet is a network of networks, allowing communication between computers located on networks operated by different entities.
*The* internet is most famous one everyone has in mind when speaking about internet.
The different darknets are all seperate internets as these networks are not directly reachable from *the* internet or from each other.
What many people don’t know is that there are actually cables running in the oceans to connect networks across the world
The idea of two computers communicating with each other 1 to 1 over a distance already existed before the concept of what became the Internet was conceived. In fact it was the complication of having to swap computers or disconnect and reconnect if you wanted to change which remote computer you were talking to that inspired the internet.
Basically I’m the late 1960’s a group of computer researchers decided to try and solve that problem. They met multiple times and came up with the early protocols (aka communication rules) and designs that would be required. The presented their ideas at conferences, got feedback from other computer researchers and refined their ideas.
Eventually, in 1969 the first communication between two computers on ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet, occurred when a transmission was sent between one computer at UCLA to another at Stanford. By the end of that year two additional nodes, one at UC-Santa Barbara and another at the University of Utah were added.
From there things continued to grow as more nodes were added and more networks were connected using the agree upon protocols. So like most projects it started out small and then grew from there.
This was before what we know as the internet,
I worked on a open source project back in the late 80’s, early 90’s called TunaNet, It was an open access email/message system. We were trying to have a chain of bbs owners in every area code, so we could link together (one by one over a phone line) and send emails to people in other states. We originally were trying to get enough people so there wouldn’t be any long distance charges, but around the same time the phone company (C&P for me locally) changed the long distance billing without really notifying us. So we all ended up quickly amassing these huge phone bills. Mine broke about 400$ for a month, which shut the whole project down for me and a few others.
The program was running on Apple ][e/c/gs’s at the time, it eventually moved on to PC and was picked up by a college in Florida, from what I remember.
If you have two computers in the same room, it’s easy to connect them together. You just need a couple wires.
If you want to connect a few computers together, you can connect them all to the same wire, but they need to have some clever logic to share the wire. (For example you could carefully assign every computer a time when they’re allowed to talk. Or you could just have each computer talk whenever it has something to say and no other computer is talking, then if two computers try to talk at the same time, both stop talking and wait a random time until trying to talk again.)
To be sure each computer has time to talk, they should do their transmissions in short bursts called “packets.” If you want to have a long conversation, like sending a big file, you can send as many packets as you want — hundreds, thousands, millions, whatever it takes. You can also assign each computer a number (“network address”), and add some extra information to the beginning of the packet (“packet header”) to tell you which computer that packet is coming from and going to. Of course you need a detailed engineering spec (protocol) to tell you what this data looks like, how it’s organized, and the lower-level electrical signaling — the protocol is the “language” of the network.
If you want to connect a lot of computers together, perhaps over long distances, a single wire doesn’t work any more. At this point, you need to divide the system into several wires, then have one computer (“router”) attached to all the wires. The router will move packets between the wires based on information in the packet header.
If you want to connect even more computers together, it gets too hard to have all the wires connect to the same place. Now you need multiple routers, and have the routers connect to each other. In a very large network it’s not even possible for all the routers to connect to the same place, so a packet headed to a faraway wire will usually be able to get to its destination, but it will need to take an indirect path through multiple routers.
After a while a bunch of different companies / universities / governments all have networks like this, and some of them want to connect to each other.
Problem: Each has its own “languages” (protocols) and way of assigning numbers to computers (network addresses). And nobody’s willing to change their network, because it would be expensive and disruptive.
Solution: Make a new protocol and scheme for assigning numbers to computers. Then have each network add a router that speaks both the new protocol and the network’s existing protocol. Put the new protocol’s packet headers inside the existing network’s packets. Now everybody can talk to other networks over the new protocol, and nobody had to do a bunch of expensive and disruptive changes to their existing network.
Now we need a name for what we’ve done. Whenever we’re INTER-connecting a bunch of NET-works, let’s call it an INTER-NET for short. Except when you have multiple inter-nets, it seems that quite often somebody will connect those multiple inter-nets to each other. So really you end up with one giant inter-net that connects most of the world’s computers: The Internet.
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