It has been 60 years of constant technological advances for the Internet to reach the heart of your daily life. We give you an unmissable account of the history of the ” WWW “ and the most relevant milestones in all its aspects until reaching the impact it has reached on humanity today.
This technology has allowed that the advances of the last 50 years have been more abundant than all that we had done before , without a doubt it has been an enhancer of our evolution to an unprecedented level.
From its beginnings and current applications, to social media and its influence on the global economy, check out this comprehensive guide to the history of the Internet .
Index:
What is the Internet and what is this revolutionary technology for?
Internet is a unique word, an expression that was born with this wonderful invention and summarizes one meaning: a decentralized computer network with a global reach. Six words that cover 60 years of research, trillions of euros in investment and millions of jobs around the planet .
It is a system of networks linked by protocols that offer different services on demand. The only thing the internet can’t totally do for you is sleep and eat, although it can suggest how to do these things . It is a complete revolution that leaves the power to choose in the hand of each one of us. And that’s what it’s all about, giving people more control over the different choices they make in their lives.
Internet applications What are all the uses that can be given to this technology?
Only at the end of 2020 , the number of Internet users in the world increased by 7% and the figure exceeded the barrier of 4.5 billion people connected .
These are the main uses that can be given to this technology:
Get closer to other people
Today we have powerful new ways of communicating with others. You choose if you want a direct and reciprocal communication with one or more people , or an alternative communication in which you hope to have new followers.
Social networks and instant messaging, both with different paths, reach the same destination: getting closer to other people. By June 2020, there were more than 13.8 billion accounts open on the 15 most influential messaging and social media platforms in the world. Only Facebook , YouTube and WhatsApp add more than 6 billion active accounts. They are the three platforms that dominate the global market .
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Recreation
It is the second reason why a user connects to the Internet. Good for watching videos, listening to music, playing online games, and reviewing landscapes on the Google image bank . As not everything is working and studying remotely, the use of the Internet for recreational activities is important.
Just to refer to the video game industry, it is estimated that the average “gamer” is about 34 years old and it is expected that in the year 2021 the industry will reach about 180 billion euros in profits . 60% of Americans are active in some kind of online video game, 45% of them are women.
Entrepreneurship
What is not on the Internet does not exist, this phrase applies with greater emphasis to companies that try to follow in traditional marketing plans without taking digital marketing into account. For example, 51% of potential buyers first search Google for a product purchase reference before making their decision.
For what you do not appear in this search engine, you are not into anything . It is expected that by 2021, e-commerce sales will increase to 4.5 billion euros in the world. And for new ventures, it is ideal to sell and offer services on the Internet, because on a small scale the resources to start a business are minimal, compared to what a large industry must invest and maintain its online reputation.
Chronology of the history of the Internet When nation and how has it evolved so far?
After the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1957 the United States created the Advanced Research Projects Agency known as ARPA . This organization created the foundations of what the Internet is. In 1962 it was possible to connect computers in a decentralized way in a single space.
In 1965 they managed to connect a computer in Massachusetts with another computer in California. By 1969 there were already four universities with the Arpanet project , to maintain communications in the event of war. In 1973, Arpanet managed to connect institutions in England and Norway. The TCP / IP protocol began to be used in 1983 , the official year of birth of Arpa Internet and soon after it would only be known as the Internet.
Background to its birth What were the innovations that preceded the Internet?
The first big steps in the Internet bases are in the military area. The high diplomatic and military tension makes the US and the Soviet Union look for ways to establish secure communications and protect data .
In 1969, Bell Labs created “UNIX”, which allowed access from one computer to another and a higher-level and more sophisticated standard protocol known as TCP / IP . By 1985, the Internet was consolidated as a communication tool and data transfer between researchers through email , which is the first form of communication that has survived today.
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What is known today as the Internet is actually a set of independent local area and wide area networks:
CERN, the European Internet
It was created in 1954 and is present in 22 states of the European Union. It is an interconnected set of particle accelerators, but its early research fueled the development of the Internet . By December 1990, the basics of the web, URL, HTTP, and HTML were in place .
On April 30, 1993, the center released the source code of the “WWW” and catapulted it into the public domain . By the end of 1993, thanks to this fact there were more than 500 known web servers and a year later there were more than 10,000 servers.
ARPANET the first version of the Internet that we know today
The project is consolidated when the University of California, Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah are connected to each other. In December 1969, Arpanet took its gigantic step and has become a constant development project up to this point .
Several projects in parallel, in the United States and Europe, focus on the same path to implement a computer network that will communicate to different academic and state institutions. The first communication through ARPANET was made on October 29, 1969 , between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. As a curious fact, the first message between both universities was the word “login”.
Birth of DNS protocols How did they revolutionize the industry?
Up to this point, everything was based on numbers , mathematical formulas, and domains indecipherable to the average eye. What happen after? The DNS protocol was created , which in short is a domain name server . It is the database that connects with the requests of users to quickly enter a website.
They translate the information from a domain to the corresponding IP address and back. If the DNS did not exist , instead of placing in the address bar www.google.com, you would have to place the numbers “216.58.217.36.
When Arpanet was created, a precarious communication service between people was created , an idea that was not on the table because communications were only going to be between machines. Researchers from connected universities and some entities in the United States were forced to have personal communications, they did something more useful in that caveman email. Thus they began to exchange ideas and projects in a comfortable way. The first email exchange between two computers was completed in 1971.
The first emails went from one computer to another , then one to several. By the end of 2020, there were more than 3 billion email users . 50% of buyers in the world use email to close deals.
In turn, Usenet is a way of sharing files between users that requires an intermediate server that houses the content that one person uploads for someone else to download. Unlike the P2P service , which goes directly from one user to another, without an intermediary, the Usenet uses servers that host all that content that is later reused . It is an increasingly popular service and is like sending an email, but instead of composing messages, files of all kinds are sent.
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The World Wide Web changed everything
It began as a tool for scientists in 1989, but when Tim Berners-Lee realized his work and its potential, a technological revolution began that benefits humanity to this day. It started without colors, or photos or videos. There were only paragraphs and paragraphs of content and links.
Thanks to the World Wide Web there are Google and Facebook . The project was born at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Physics , as a way to communicate with 10,000 other scientists. By 1990, the Internet served only to send emails and share files in a precarious and basic way.
How did the first search engines improve access to information on the web?
Yes, Google is the king of search engines, but it was not the first. “Archie” was created in 1990 and indexed file names, thus creating a public database of files that had names that matched the search. In 1991 “Gopher” was born , then the search engines Veronica and Jugher, but the latter two searched for the files in the Gopher database .
In 1997, Wandex began to work , this is the first search engine in history since it launched the first “spider” to track all the titles of the webs that existed at that time, it took two years to index them all. For 1993 the JumpStation search engine operates , a primitive Google because it used spiders and only indexed the titles and the summary of each web.
Between 1993 and 1998 there were other similar projects, but then Google came to hit the market hard . His search results were better and through word of mouth he was gaining ground. For the year 2010, one 84,96% of web searches are made on Google.
The .com domains and their popular bubble How did they impact the world economy?
The first domain “.com” was created on March 15, 1985 by the company Symbolics , computer manufacturers. At that time, the Internet was not designed for commercial companies and less to channel requests or sell. The “.com” domain had more to do with government companies that required an Internet presence for state reasons .
The Verisign company was the first to guarantee an easy and secure registration to any commercial or non-commercial company that wanted to have a domain on the web. It reached more than 219 million daily queries to the DNS that they offered. Almost 40 years after this contribution, the extensions allow security and give clarity to users about what the web they visit is about.
Social media and the consumer industry
Everything on the web is based on the consumption of information, in obtaining new experiences, knowledge and skills. Back in 2002, two Silicon Valey entrepreneurs created Fotolog , the first social network in history and the first in photography. This platform allowed you to upload a photo a day and receive dozens of comments , there were no “likes” buttons or anything like that.
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In 2006 they received 10 thousand new followers every day, but in 2016 they had to close before the power acquired by the competition. They were joined by MySpace, Hi5, Buzz and SecondLife . All with the same pattern of periodicals and reaction capture . This gave way to the impulse of data consumption, the consumption of information that today prevails in networks such as Instagram, where we already see sections of stores, content management and instant messaging.
Influencers and their impact on popular culture
After the boom of social networks today, a group of people is born who take monetary advantage of their daily publications on the networks. The native influencer was created in the same social network , due to the consumption of its publications by users, the usefulness of its content and, above all, the ability to generate a purchase choice in people.
The personalities who have already traveled a path in the public scramble are not natives of social networks, however they also have an effect on their followers. How lucrative is it to be an influencer? A person with 500 thousand reapers can easily charge 200 euros for posting a single message on their timeline . While a user with 50 thousand followers, charges on average between € 50 and € 100.
Popular culture has varied with this practice, marketing plans include influencers , who set purchasing trends, lifestyles and induce ways of thinking based on the consumption of products and services .
The Internet of Things “IoT” to bring everything to life
Although we see this concept more applied to daily life due to technological advancement, the idea actually originated in 1999. The term “Internet of Things” was coined by Kevin Ashton , one of the founders of the MIT Auto-ID Center . He thought that one day the time would come for objects to share data over the Internet to make our lives easier . How is this? A smart home in which the heating is regulated automatically .
In which every so often the sprinklers in the garden are turned on with the right frequency according to the seasons. A factory in which a minimum number of people is required to assemble things . The idea is to give life to everything to facilitate people’s daily lives and not to replace them. The idea has adapted quite well to the area of cell phones, smart TVs and a perfect synchronization between watches that measure the pulse and blood pressure, and that data reaches the record of the specialist in charge.