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From Dial Up To 5G
Most millennials have seen the transformation of the internet from a slow and clunky dial-up service to what it is today. Many of us remember the annoying sounds our computers made when connecting to the internet and how mom and dad would yell at us to get off so they could make a phone call.
This edition, we'll explore the internet from its humble beginnings to where it is now.
Humble Beginnings
What if I told you that the image below is closer to present day than when the internet was "invented?"
It's crazy, but true.
The first real version of the internet dates back to the 1960s. Not only was it the summer of love and held some of the greatest music of all time, but 1969 was also the year that ARPAnet was born.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) focused on developing a way to communicate across great distances that did not involve phone lines or wires. Think Cold War stuff, mass paranoia of the end of the world.
Development of ARPAnet was mainly being researched and conducted by academia and in 1969, the first computers were linked between Stanford and UCLA. Additional universities were later added and this structure later became the foundations of the internet.
1970s- I Don't Understand This Well
From what I can tell from researching this, linking computers together was becoming popular in the 1970s. There were various different ways to configure and connect computers together. Computers could only connect to other "like" computers that were configured simialrly.
The main thing that came out of the 1970s regarding the internet is TCP/IP, also known as Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. Still, the internet was mostly used by researchers and government officials. The first "email" was sent in 1971.
That's all I have to say about that.
WWW and Browsers
In the late 80s and early 90s, the internet began to go "mainstream." In 1989, the World Wide Web was invented. This allowed users to access documents stored on servers that could be located using a URL. Of course, one needed a browser do to this.
This led to the "Browser Wars" of the 90s, with Microsoft winning out over Netscape. I remember using Netscape Navigator as a kid, and then Earthlink. See image below, courtesy of Reddit.
The Internet As We Know It
Let's pick back up from where we left off in the intro. In the late 90s, the internet was here. A new era had begun. If you had a phone line, you could hook up to the internet (generally speaking).
It was slow, and limited users from a single connection. And yeah, you couldn't make a phone call while you were surfing the web. So broadband came, which used a cable and DSL (Direct Service Lines) for faster speeds.
There were other technological advances during this time, too many to discuss in a newsletter, but understand that other things happened here! (Wifi, social media, etc.)
Mobile Internet
In the late 90s, mobile internet came to the scene. It was terribly slow and there was not a user friendly browsing experience. In 2007 with Apple's release of the iPhone and mobile browser, that all changed. Mobile internet speed was 3G, which was fast enough to browse the internet and check/send emails.
I remember where I was and what I was doing the first time I saw a friend with an iPhone. You could only get one with AT&T as a carrier and I was SUPER jealous.
Now here we are in 2022, addicted to our phones.
In Conclusion
There's a lot to unpack here and I can't do the entire history of the internet justice in a newsletter. Take a look at the website that I used for my research HERE.
As always, thank you for your support. The struggle is real, but you got this!