The Internet
…a brief history
National borders aren’t even speed bumps on the information superhighway. ~Tim May, former chief scientist at Intel.
Summarizing all the potentials of the internet would be as easy to conclude how it has shaped us as people in the past two decades of its fairly mainstream presence. Sure our lives have become increasingly accessible and each person now maintains their online personal life like the press office of any D-list celebrity, but were these the original goals of the computer pioneers. – hardly.
Around fifty years ago the only people harboring any love for computers were computer experts, however, now even the glitziest, most gossip-conscious fashionistas regularly log on to keep their affairs updated. It is hard to imagine an existence without portable laptops now.
As superbly small as they are, portable netbooks can hold an immense amount of data compared to the capacity of the very first computer. It could only perform one task at a time, something even smart phones can outperform in modern days. It soon developed, however, and as its ability to concentrate more information into its hardware grew, the idea of an interconnected web was more within grasp than before.
Numerous countries started enhancing their web ideologies, with the US developing ARPANET and the British creating NPL, both of which were later merged with similar platforms from Germany and France. Their new combined name was the Internet.
Around the time these networks were emerging, the cold war had reached an interesting phase, in which the US and the Soviet Union were testing each others’ patience with satellite exploration. The USSR launched the first space satellite called Sputnik in 1957, which was counteracted by the American Defense Advance Research Project in 1958.
This rivalry has persisted to this day, however in a much less agile way in the past few decades as all networks have become progressively intertwined. Original networks were fairly recently abandoned and the Internet has remained the standard ever since.