The creation of the Internet, which the European nuclear research laboratory Cern celebrates the 30th anniversary on Tuesday, made it possible to open up to the general public the Internet, born in the 1960s in the United States.

1969: ARPANET

On October 29, 1969, scientists at UCLA (The University of California at Los Angeles) headed by Leonard Kleinrock, attempt to exchange data between two computers. First objective: type three letters (“LOG”), send them (in binary form) to the second machine which must complete them to form the word “LOGIN” (identifier).

This is the birth of the ARPANET network, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an organization of the US Department of Defense.

Four computers form the first nucleus of ARPANET, a university and military network considered to be the father of the Internet, which grew from 13 computers in 1970 to 213 in 1981.

In 1971, the American Ray Tomlinson sent the first electronic mail on ARPANET. It is he who defines the separation of the name of the user from that of the network to which it is attached by the at sign “@” character.

1983: Communicating in a Network

To exchange information between two computers within the same network, you need a “protocol”, a series of steps governed by communication rules.

The Americans Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed TCP / IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) in the 1970s, which is still used today. It allows two computers, identified by their IP addresses, to exchange data split into several packets.

The protocol was definitively adopted in 1983 on ARPANET, to which it made it possible to connect other computer networks, in particular universities. From these interconnections, the Internet is born.

1989: The Birth of the Web

On March 12, 1989 at CERN, the British physicist Tim Berners-Lee offered his hierarchy a “decentralized information management system”. Objective: to find information on the work of a researcher, a technology, a specific project, while all are linked without being stored in the same place.

It offers a hypertext link system: the possibility from a page, of clicking on keywords which lead directly to the page devoted to them, itself containing links to other pages and so on.

In 1990, the Belgian Robert Cailliau joined Berners-Lee to contribute to the promotion of his invention which is based on the HTML language (which makes it possible to create web pages), the HTTP hypertext exchange protocol (which allows the user to request and then receive a web page) and the URL (the address of a web page). The principle of hypertext and a network of interconnected computers, the Internet, are thus linked.

On December 20, the first server (a computer where web pages, images, videos, etc.) and the first website are put into service.

The web was made public in April 1993. It was popularized from November with the launch of Mosaic, the first browser to support images. The browser (today Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer, for the main ones) revolutionizes the web: without it, you have to type computer commands yourself to browse the web, which requires skills beyond the reach of most users.

The web is causing the number of internet users to explode, from a few million in the early 1990s to over 400 million in 2000.

The 2000s: Mobiles and Social Networks

The 2000s marked the beginning of consumer mobile internet. In 2007, Apple created a wave of smartphones. In 10 years, we have gone from 268 million to 4.2 billion mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide.

Social networks with a very large audience appeared in 2003. The following year, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, initially online trombinoscope at Harvard University. Today it has 2.3 billion users.

Now is the Time to enter one of the most Dynamic and Exciting Industry! Become a Certified Professional and get ahead in your life, Today!