Microsoft's brief history of the Internet

[pynchonoid]

http://www.microsoft.com/insider/guide/history.asp

A brief history of the Internet

The U.S. Department of Defense laid the foundation of
the Internet roughly 30 years ago with a network
called ARPANET. But the general public didn't use the
Internet much until after the development of the World
Wide Web in the early 1990s. As recently as June 1993,
there were only 130 Web sites. Now there are millions.
Here's a quick look at how it all came to be. 

*	The beginnings: ARPANET 
*	Tim Berners-Lee: Father of the Web 
*	Who's in control here? 
*	What are domains? 

  

The beginnings: ARPANET 


In 1957, the U.S. government formed the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a segment of the
Department of Defense charged with ensuring U.S.
leadership in science and technology with military
applications. In 1969, ARPA established ARPANET, the
forerunner of the Internet. 


Research and education 


ARPANET was a network that connected major computers
at the University of California at Los Angeles, the
University of California at Santa Barbara, Stanford
Research Institute, and the University of Utah. Within
a couple of years, several other educational and
research institutions joined the network. 


In response to the threat of nuclear attack, ARPANET
was designed to allow continued communication if one
or more sites were destroyed. [...]


What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of
course, making humanist arguments almost irrelevant,
is the technology. We must not be too distracted by
the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in
Winston Smith's era. In "our" 1984, after all, the
integrated circuit chip was less than a decade old,
and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the
wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most
notably the internet, a development that promises
social control on a scale those quaint old
20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could
only dream about."
-Thomas Pynchon, Foreword to _1984_


continues:
http://www.microsoft.com/insider/guide/history.asp


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