History of the Internet

The year is 1957 and the USSR has just launched the first artificial earth satellite. In response America launches the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DOD) to create America's lead in science and technology. The Internet had its humble beginnings here, within ARPA's many projects. The Internet has become one of the key symbols of today's pop culture: everything has a "dot com" address; people do not say "call me," but instead its "I'll E-mail you;" and the new word on the stock market is "E-business." The Internet has not always been such a key figure in American life; in fact it was mostly unheard of until recently. The theory for the Internet first started being published in 1961 with Leonard Kleinrock's document on packet-switching theory, "Information Flow in Large Communication Net." This document presented the theory behind the first problem of the Internet, and how to solve it1. The problem was this: when a large document is sent then pieces of it become lost in transfer and the entire document has to be resent, but then different pieces are missing from the new copy of the document. This is a major problem and the obvious solution is to "chop" the information up into smaller pieces and then transmit the smaller pieces2. Then another problem was realized, how does the computer know where to put these small bits of information? The solution to that was what has come to be known as packet-switching (PS). In PS, the entire document is sent in a bunch of tiny "packets," these packets contain the information of the document "wrapped" in its placement on the page. The receiving computer then sends a message back to the transmitting computer telling it which packets were corrupted or missing and the transmitting computer then re-sends the lost information3. The next problem that the Internet faced was first discovered at the ARPA's networking project,