title: Trisha (actress)

text: "Namo Venkatesa" was her sole Telugu release in 2010. In the same year, she starred in "Manmadhan Ambu" with Kamal Haasan and R Madhavan and made her début in Bollywood with the Priyadarshan film "Khatta Meetha". Upon release, the film received mixed reviews from critics and Box Office India declared it an average performer at the box office. She was part of two commercially successful ventures in 2011, "Theenmaar" in Telugu and Venkat Prabhu's "Mankatha" in Tamil. The latter was the highest-grossing Tamil film of the year.


title: Trisha (actress)

text: She had two Telugu releases in 2012-"Bodyguard", a remake of the same-titled Malayalam film, which saw her being paired with Daggubati Venkatesh for the third time, and "Dammu" opposite Jr NTR-and two Tamil releases in 2013-"Samar" starring Vishal, and the comedy drama "Endrendrum Punnagai" starring Jiiva. She signed on two "women-centric" bilingual projects featuring female lead casts, titled "Rambha Urvasi Menaka" and "Kannaale Kannan". Although both films were commenced, they were stalled in 2013.


title: Trisha (actress)

text: Her releases in 2015 included "Yennai Arindhaal" opposite Ajith Kumar, "Thoongavanam" with Kamal Haasan, and "Bhooloham" with Jayam Ravi in Tamil. She also acted in the horror film "Aranmanai 2" (2017).


title: Trisha (actress)

text: In 2018, she acted in a Malayalam film "Hey Jude" with Nivin Pauly making her Malayalam debut. She played a leading role in a Tamil romantic drama "'96" opposite Vijay Sethupathi and received unanimous praise from critics. Janani K of India Today praised her performance as her career best. She won several accolades for her performance as "Jaanu" in "'96", including Best Actress at Filmfare Awards South, SIIMA Awards, Edison Awards, Norway Tamil Film Festival Awards, and Ananda Vikatan Cinema Awards. She was a part of tamil film "Petta" in 2019, alongside Superstar Rajinikanth in a brief role.


title: Trisha (actress)

text: She was next seen in Mani Ratnam's 2022 film "," in the role of the Chola princess, Kundavai, which received positive reviews for her acting.


title: Trisha (actress)

text: An ardent animal lover, Trisha has been the Goodwill Ambassador of PETA. In 2010, Trisha collaborated with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in issuing a public appeal to domesticate stray dogs rather than craving for pedigreed foreign breeds. She was also the Goodwill Ambassador for the "Angel for Animals" campaign organised by PETA in 2010, encouraging people to adopt homeless dogs. PETA praised Trisha for her work, and sent her an appreciation letter highlighting her animal rescue work and efforts to encourage people to adopt Indian community dogs.


title: Trisha (actress)

text: Trisha replaced Rani Mukherjee as the brand ambassador of Fanta India. She is the brand ambassador of Scooty Pep+, for which she has replaced Preity Zinta. She is also the brand ambassador for Vivel Di Wills, a product by ITC Limited. In 2011, she replaced Asin in Fairever fairness cream commercial.


title: Trisha (actress)

text: Trisha resides in Chennai with her mother and grandmother. Trisha's father died in October 2012. She converses fluently in Tamil, English, Hindi, and French. She follows a vegetarian diet


title: Trisha (actress)

text: Her mother Uma Krishnan, had been offered various roles by several Tamil film makers and actors including Kamal Hasaan, but turned them down, as she wanted to concentrate on Trisha's career. She accompanies Trisha on film shoots, events, and functions, and they have appeared together only in a commercial advertisement. About her relationship with her mother, Trisha remarks, "She has been the pillar of my strength and has stood by me like a rock through thick and thin.[...] Everyone in the industry and my friends know how close I'm to my mom."


title: Trisha (actress)

text: On 23 January 2015 Trisha became engaged to Varun Manian, a Chennai-based businessman. In May 2015, she confirmed that the couple had ended their engagement.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Phineas Taylor Barnum (; July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891) was an American showman, businessman, and politician, remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus (1871–2017) with James Anthony Bailey. He was also an author, publisher, and philanthropist, though he said of himself: "I am a showman by profession ... and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me." According to his critics, his personal aim was "to put money in his own coffers". He is widely credited with coining the adage "There's a sucker born every minute", although no evidence has been collected of him saying this.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum became a small business owner in his early twenties and founded a weekly newspaper before moving to New York City in 1834. He embarked on an entertainment career, first with a variety troupe called "Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater", and soon after by purchasing Scudder's American Museum which he renamed after himself. He used the museum as a platform to promote hoaxes and human curiosities such as the Fiji mermaid and General Tom Thumb. In 1850, he promoted the American tour of Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, paying her an unprecedented $1,000 a night for 150 nights. He suffered economic reversals in the 1850s due to bad investments, as well as years of litigation and public humiliation, but he used a lecture tour as a temperance speaker to emerge from debt. His museum added America's first aquarium and expanded the wax-figure department.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum served two terms in the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as a Republican for Fairfield, Connecticut. He spoke before the legislature concerning the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude: "A human soul, 'that God has created and Christ died for,' is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab, or a Hottentot—it is still an immortal spirit". He was elected in 1875 as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut where he worked to improve the water supply, bring gas lighting to streets, and enforce liquor and prostitution laws. He was also instrumental in starting Bridgeport Hospital in 1878 and was its first president. Nevertheless, the circus business, begun when he was 60 years old, was the source of much of his enduring fame. He established "P. T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome" in 1870, a traveling circus, menagerie, and museum of "freaks" which adopted many names over the years.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum was married to Charity Hallett from 1829 until her death in 1873, and they had four children. In 1874, a few months after his wife's death, he married Nancy Fish, his friend's daughter who was 40 years younger than P. T. Barnum. They were married until 1891 when Barnum died of a stroke at his home. He was buried in Mountain Grove Cemetery, Bridgeport, which he designed himself.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum was born in Bethel, Connecticut, the son of innkeeper, tailor, and store-keeper Philo Barnum (1778–1826) and his second wife Irene Taylor. His maternal grandfather Phineas Taylor was a Whig, legislator, landowner, justice of the peace, and lottery schemer who had a great influence on him.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum had several businesses over the years, including a general store, a book auctioning trade, real estate speculation, and a statewide lottery network. He started a weekly newspaper in 1829 called "The Herald of Freedom" in Danbury, Connecticut. His editorials against the elders of local churches led to libel suits and a prosecution which resulted in imprisonment for two months, but he became a champion of the liberal movement upon his release. He sold his store in 1834.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: He began his career as a showman in 1835 when he was 25 with the purchase and exhibition of a blind and almost completely paralyzed slave woman named Joice Heth, whom an acquaintance was trumpeting around Philadelphia as George Washington's former nurse and 161 years old. Slavery was already outlawed in New York, but he exploited a loophole which allowed him to lease her for a year for $1,000, borrowing $500 to complete the sale. Heth died in February 1836, at no more than 80 years old. Barnum had worked her for 10 to 12 hours a day, and he hosted a live autopsy of her body in a New York saloon where spectators paid 50 cents to see the dead woman cut up, as he revealed that she was likely half her purported age.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum had a year of mixed success with his first variety troupe called "Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater", followed by the Panic of 1837 and three years of difficult circumstances. He purchased Scudder's American Museum in 1841, located at Broadway and Ann Street, New York City. He improved the attraction, upgrading the building and adding exhibits, then renamed it "Barnum's American Museum"; it became a popular showplace. He added a lighthouse lamp which attracted attention up and down Broadway and flags along the roof's edge that attracted attention in daytime, while giant paintings of animals between the upper windows drew attention from pedestrians. The roof was transformed to a strolling garden with a view of the city, where he launched hot-air balloon rides daily. A changing series of live acts and curiosities were added to the exhibits of stuffed animals, including albinos, giants, little people, jugglers, magicians, exotic women, detailed models of cities and famous battles, and a menagerie of animals.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: In 1842 Barnum introduced his first major hoax: a creature with the body of a monkey and the tail of a fish known as the "Feejee" mermaid. He leased it from fellow museum owner Moses Kimball of Boston who became his friend, confidant, and collaborator. Barnum justified his hoaxes by saying that they were advertisements to draw attention to the museum. "I don't believe in duping the public", he said, "but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them."


title: P. T. Barnum

text: He followed the mermaid by exhibiting Charles Stratton, the little person called "General Tom Thumb" ("the Smallest Person that ever Walked Alone") who was then four years old but was stated to be 11. With heavy coaching and natural talent, the boy was taught to imitate people from Hercules to Napoleon.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: In 1843 Barnum hired the Native American dancer fu-Hum-Me, the first of many First Nations people whom he presented. During 1844–45 he toured with General Tom Thumb in Europe and met Queen Victoria, who was amused but saddened by the little man, and the event was a publicity coup. It opened the door to visits from royalty throughout Europe, including the Tsar of Russia, and enabled Barnum to acquire dozens of new attractions, including automatons and other mechanical marvels. During this time he went on a spending spree and bought other museums, including artist Rembrandt Peale's Museum in Philadelphia, the nation's first major museum. By late 1846, Barnum's Museum was drawing 400,000 visitors a year.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum became aware of the popularity of Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale", during his European tour with Tom Thumb when her career was at its height in Europe. Barnum had never heard her and conceded to being unmusical himself, but he approached her to sing in America at $1,000 a night for 150 nights, all expenses paid by him. He was confident that he could make use of Lind's reputation for morality and philanthropy in his publicity.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Lind demanded the fee in advance and Barnum agreed; this permitted her to raise a fund for charities, principally endowing schools for poor children in Sweden. Barnum borrowed heavily on his mansion and his museum to raise the money to pay Lind but he was still short of funds; so he persuaded a Philadelphia minister that Lind would be a good influence on American morals, and the minister lent him the final $6,000. The contract also gave Lind the option of withdrawing from the tour after 60 or 100 performances, paying Barnum $50,000 if she did so. Lind and her small company sailed to America in September 1850, but she was a celebrity even before she arrived because of Barnum's months of preparations; close to 40,000 people greeted her at the docks and another 20,000 at her hotel. The press was also in attendance, and "Jenny Lind items" were available to buy. When she realized how much money Barnum stood to make from the tour, she insisted on a new agreement which he signed on September 3, 1850. This gave her the original fee plus the remainder of each concert's profits after Barnum's $5,500 management fee. She was determined to accumulate as much money as possible for her charities.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: The tour began with a concert at Castle Garden on September 11, 1850, and it was a major success, recouping Barnum four times his investment. Washington Irving proclaimed, "She is enough to counterbalance, of herself, all the evil that the world is threatened with by the great convention of women. So God save Jenny Lind!" Tickets for some of her concerts were in such demand that Barnum sold them by auction, and public enthusiasm was so strong that the press coined the term "Lind mania". The blatant commercialism of Barnum's ticket auctions distressed Lind, and she persuaded him to make a substantial number of tickets available at reduced prices.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: On the tour Barnum's publicity always preceded Lind's arrival and whipped up enthusiasm; he had up to 26 journalists on his payroll. After New York, the company toured the East Coast with continued success, and later went through the Southern states and Cuba. By early 1851, Lind had become uncomfortable with Barnum's relentless marketing of the tour, and she invoked a contractual right to sever her ties with him. They parted amicably, and she continued the tour for nearly a year under her own management. Lind gave 93 concerts in America for Barnum, earning her about $350,000, while Barnum netted at least $500,000 ().


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum's next challenge was to change public attitudes about the theater which was widely seen as a so-called "den of evil". He wanted to position theaters as palaces of edification and delight, and as respectable middle-class entertainment. He built New York City's largest and most modern theater, naming it the "Moral Lecture Room." He hoped that this would avoid seedy connotations, attract a family crowd, and win the approval of the moral crusaders of New York City. He started the nation's first theatrical matinées to encourage families and to lessen the fear of crime. He opened with "The Drunkard," a thinly disguised temperance lecture (he had become a teetotaler after returning from Europe). He followed that with melodramas, farces, and historical plays put on by highly regarded actors. He watered down Shakespearean plays and others such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to make them family entertainment.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: He organized flower shows, beauty contests, dog shows, and poultry contests, but the most popular were baby contests such as the fattest baby or the handsomest twins. In 1853 he started the pictorial weekly newspaper "Illustrated News"; he completed his autobiography a year later which sold more than a million copies over the course of numerous revisions. Mark Twain loved the book, but the "British Examiner" thought it "trashy" and "offensive" and wrote that it inspired "nothing but sensations of disgust" and "sincere pity for the wretched man who compiled it".


title: P. T. Barnum

text: In the early 1850s Barnum began investing to develop East Bridgeport, Connecticut. He made substantial loans to the Jerome Clock Company to get it to move to his new industrial area, but the company went bankrupt by 1856, taking Barnum's wealth with it. This started four years of litigation and public humiliation. Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed that Barnum's downfall showed "the gods visible again" and other critics celebrated Barnum's public dilemma. But Tom Thumb offered his services, as he was touring on his own, and the two undertook another European tour. Barnum also started a lecture tour, mostly as a temperance speaker. By 1860, he emerged from debt and built a mansion which he called "Lindencroft", and he resumed ownership of his museum.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum went on to create America's first aquarium and to expand the wax figure department of his museum. His "Seven Grand Salons" demonstrated the Seven Wonders of the World. The collections expanded to four buildings, and he published a "Guide Book to the Museum" which claimed 850,000 "curiosities". Late in 1860, Siamese Twins Chang and Eng came out of retirement because they needed more money to send their numerous children to college. They had a touring career on their own and went to live on a North Carolina plantation with their families and slaves under the name of Bunker. They also appeared at Barnum's Museum for six weeks. Also in 1860, Barnum introduced "man-monkey" William Henry Johnson, a microcephalic black little person who spoke a mysterious language created by Barnum. In 1862 he discovered giantess Anna Swan and Commodore Nutt, a new Tom Thumb with whom Barnum visited President Abraham Lincoln at the White House. During the Civil War, his museum drew large audiences seeking diversion from the conflict. He added pro-Unionist exhibits, lectures, and dramas, and he demonstrated commitment to the cause. He hired Pauline Cushman in 1864, an actress who had served as a spy for the Union, to lecture about her "thrilling adventures" behind Confederate lines. Barnum's Unionist sympathies incited a Confederate sympathizer to start a fire in 1864. Barnum's American Museum burned to the ground on July 13, 1865, from a fire of unknown origin. Barnum re-established it at another location in New York City, but this also was destroyed by fire in March 1868. The loss was too great the second time, and Barnum retired from the museum business.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum did not enter the circus business until he was 60 years old. He established "P. T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome" in Delavan, Wisconsin, in 1870 with William Cameron Coup; it was a traveling circus, menagerie, and museum of "freaks". It went through various names: "P. T. Barnum's Travelling World's Fair, Great Roman Hippodrome and Greatest Show on Earth", and "P. T. Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth, And The Great London Circus, Sanger's Royal British Menagerie and The Grand International Allied Shows United" after an 1881 merger with James Bailey and James L. Hutchinson, soon shortened to "Barnum & Bailey's". This entertainment phenomenon was the first circus to display three rings. The show's first primary attraction was Jumbo, an African elephant that Barnum purchased in 1882 from the London Zoo. The Barnum and Bailey Circus still contained acts similar to his Traveling Menagerie, including acrobats, freak shows, and General Tom Thumb. Barnum persisted in growing the circus in spite of more fires, train disasters, and other setbacks, and he was aided by circus professionals who ran the daily operations. He and Bailey split up in 1885, but they came back together in 1888 with the "Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show On Earth", later "Barnum & Bailey Circus" which toured the world.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum was one of the first circus owners to move his circus by train, on the suggestion of Bailey and other business partners, and probably the first to own his own train. Given the lack of paved highways in America at that time, this turned out to be a shrewd decision that vastly expanded Barnum's geographical reach. In this new industry, Barnum leaned more on the advice of his partners, most of whom were young enough to be his sons.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum wrote several books, including "Life of P. T. Barnum" (1855), "The Humbugs of the World" (1865), "Struggles and Triumphs" (1869), "Forest and jungle, or, Thrilling adventures in all quarters of the globe :" and "The Art of Money-Getting" (1880).


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum was often referred to as the "Prince of Humbugs", and he saw nothing wrong in entertainers or vendors using hoaxes (or "humbug", as he termed it) in promotional material, as long as the public was getting value for money. However, he was contemptuous of those who made money through fraud, especially the spiritualist mediums popular in his day; he testified against noted "spirit photographer" William H. Mumler in his trial for fraud, and he exposed "the tricks of the trade" used by mediums to cheat the bereaved. In "The Humbugs of the World", he offered $500 (about $9,000 in 2021) to any medium who could prove power to communicate with the dead.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum was significantly involved in politics. He mainly focused on race, slavery, and sectionalism in the period leading up to the American Civil War. He opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which supported slavery, so he left the Democratic Party which endorsed slavery and became part of the new anti-slavery Republican Party.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum claimed that "politics were always distasteful to me", yet he was elected to the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as Republican representative for Fairfield and served four terms. He hired spies to get insider information on the New York and New Haven Railroad lines and exposed a secret that would raise fares by 20 percent. He said during the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution: "A human soul, 'that God has created and Christ died for,' is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hottentot—it is still an immortal spirit." He also acknowledged that he had owned slaves when he lived in the South. "I whipped my slaves. I ought to have been whipped a thousand times for this myself. But then I was a Democrat—one of those "nondescript" Democrats, who are Northern men with Southern principles".


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum was elected for the next four sessions and succeeded Senator Orris S. Ferry. He was the legislative sponsor of a law enacted by the Connecticut General Assembly in 1879 which prohibited the use of "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception", and also made it a crime to act as an accessory to the use of contraception; this law remained in effect in Connecticut until it was overturned in 1965 by the U.S. Supreme Court in "Griswold v. Connecticut". He ran for Congress in 1867 and lost to his third cousin William Henry Barnum. In 1875, he worked as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut to improve the water supply, bring gas lighting to streets, and enforce liquor and prostitution laws. He was instrumental in starting Bridgeport Hospital, founded in 1878, and was its first president.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum enjoyed what he publicly dubbed "profitable philanthropy". "If by improving and beautifying our city Bridgeport, Connecticut, and adding to the pleasure and prosperity of my neighbors, [and] I can do so at a profit, the incentive to 'good works' will be twice as strong as if it were otherwise." He was appointed to the board of trustees to Tufts University prior to its founding, and he made several significant contributions to the fledgling institution, including a gift of $50,000 () in 1883 to establish a museum (later known as Barnum Museum of Natural History) and hall for the Department of Natural History. Tufts made Jumbo the elephant the school's mascot, and Tufts students are known as "Jumbos".


title: P. T. Barnum

text: On November 8, 1829, Barnum married Charity Hallett, and they had four children: Caroline Cornelia (1833–1911), Helen Maria (1840–1915), Frances Irena (1842–1844), and Pauline Taylor (1846–1877). His wife died on November 19, 1873, and he married Nancy Fish, the daughter of his close friend John Fish, the following year; Nancy was 40 years younger than he was.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum died from a stroke at home in 1891 aged 80. He is buried in Mountain Grove Cemetery, Bridgeport, Connecticut, a cemetery that he designed.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum built four mansions in Bridgeport, Connecticut: Iranistan, Lindencroft, Waldemere, and Marina. Iranistan was the most notable, a Moorish Revival architecture designed by Leopold Eidlitz with domes, spires, and lacy fretwork inspired by the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England. It was built in 1848 but it burned down in 1857. The Marina Mansion was demolished by the University of Bridgeport in 1964 in order to build their cafeteria.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: At his death, critics praised Barnum for good works and called him an icon of American spirit and ingenuity. He asked the "Evening Sun" to print his obituary just prior to his death so that he might read it. On April 7, 1891, Barnum asked about the box-office receipts for the day; a few hours later, he was dead.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: In 1893, a statue in his honor was placed by his former partners James Bailey, James A. Hutchinson, and W. W. Cole, at Seaside Park in Bridgeport. Barnum had donated the land for this park in 1865. His circus was sold to Ringling Brothers on July 8, 1907, for $400,000 (about $10.45 million in 2017 dollars). The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circuses ran separately until they merged in 1919, forming the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: The United States Mint issued a commemorative coin in 1936 for Bridgeport's centennial celebration, with Barnum's portrait for the obverse. Cartoonist Walt Kelly grew up in Bridgeport and named a character in Barnum's honor in his "Pogo" comic strip. An annual six-week Barnum Festival was held for many years in Bridgeport as a tribute to Barnum. The Bethel Historical Society commissioned a life-sized sculpture to honor the 200th anniversary of his birth, created by local resident David Gesualdi and placed outside the public library. The statue was dedicated on September 26, 2010.


title: P. T. Barnum

text: Barnum co-founded the Bridgeport & Port Jefferson Steamboat Company in 1883 with Charles E. Tooker, which continues to operate across the Long Island Sound between Port Jefferson, New York and Bridgeport. The company owns and operates three vessels, one of which is named the M.V. "PT Barnum". The Barnum Museum in Bridgeport houses many of Barnum's oddities and curiosities.


title: History of the Internet

text: The history of the Internet has its origin in information theory and the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.


title: History of the Internet

text: Computer science was an emerging discipline in the late 1950s that began to consider time-sharing between computer users, and later, the possibility of achieving this over wide area networks. J. C. R. Licklider developed the idea of a universal network at the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Independently, Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation proposed a distributed network based on data in message blocks in the early 1960s, and Donald Davies conceived of packet switching in 1965 at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), proposing a national commercial data network in the United Kingdom.


title: History of the Internet

text: ARPA awarded contracts in 1969 for the development of the ARPANET project, directed by Robert Taylor and managed by Lawrence Roberts. ARPANET adopted the packet switching technology proposed by Davies and Baran, underpinned by mathematical work in the early 1970s by Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA. The network was built by Bolt, Beranek, and Newman.


title: History of the Internet

text: Several early packet-switched networks emerged in the 1970s which researched and provided data networking. ARPA projects, international working groups and commercial initiatives led to the development of various standards and protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. Bob Kahn, at ARPA, and Vint Cerf, at Stanford University, published research in 1974 that evolved into the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), two protocols of the Internet protocol suite. The design included concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin.


title: History of the Internet

text: In the early 1980s, national and international public data networks emerged based on the X.25 protocol, the design of which included the work of Rémi Després. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded national supercomputing centers at several universities in the United States, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, thus creating network access to these supercomputer sites for research and academic organizations in the United States. International connections to NSFNET, the emergence of architecture such as the Domain Name System, and the adoption of TCP/IP internationally on existing networks marked the beginnings of the Internet. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990. The optical backbone of the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic, as traffic transitioned to optical networks managed by Sprint, MCI and AT&T.


title: History of the Internet

text: Research at CERN in Switzerland by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989–90 resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network. The dramatic expansion of capacity of the Internet with the advent of wave division multiplexing (WDM) and the roll out of fiber optic cables in the mid-1990s had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology. This made possible the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, video chat, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking services, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber-optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, and 800 Gbit/s by 2019. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was rapid in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking services. However, the future of the global network may be shaped by regional differences.


title: History of the Internet

text: The concept of data communication – transmitting data between two different places through an electromagnetic medium such as radio or an electric wire – pre-dates the introduction of the first computers. Such communication systems were typically limited to point to point communication between two end devices. Semaphore lines, telegraph systems and telex machines can be considered early precursors of this kind of communication. The telegraph in the late 19th century was the first fully digital communication system.


title: History of the Internet

text: Fundamental theoretical work on information theory was developed by Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley in the 1920s. Information theory, as enunciated by Claude Shannon, in the 1948, provided a firm theoretical underpinning to understand the trade-offs between signal-to-noise ratio, bandwidth, and error-free transmission in the presence of noise, in telecommunications technology. This was one of the three key developments, along with advances in transistor technology (specifically MOS transistors) and laser technology, that made possible the rapid growth of telecommunication bandwidth over the next half-century.


title: History of the Internet

text: Early computers in the 1940s had a central processing unit and user terminals. As the technology evolved in the 1950s, new systems were devised to allow communication over longer distances (for terminals) or with higher speed (for interconnection of local devices) that were necessary for the mainframe computer model. These technologies made it possible to exchange data (such as files) between remote computers. However, the point-to-point communication model was limited, as it did not allow for direct communication between any two arbitrary systems; a physical link was necessary. The technology was also considered vulnerable for strategic and military use because there were no alternative paths for the communication in case of a broken link.


title: History of the Internet

text: The earliest computers were connected directly to terminals used by an individual user. Christopher Strachey, who became Oxford University's first Professor of Computation, filed a patent application for time-sharing in February 1959. In June that year, he gave a paper "Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers" at the UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris where he passed the concept on to J. C. R. Licklider. Licklider, vice president at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., went on to propose a computer network in his January 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis":


title: History of the Internet

text: In August 1962, Licklider and Welden Clark published the paper "On-Line Man-Computer Communication" which was one of the first descriptions of a networked future.


title: History of the Internet

text: In October 1962, Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina as director of the newly established Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within DARPA, with a mandate to interconnect the United States Department of Defense's main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and SAC HQ. There he formed an informal group within DARPA to further computer research. He began by writing memos in 1963 describing a distributed network to the IPTO staff, whom he called "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network".


title: History of the Internet

text: Although he left the IPTO in 1964, five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his vision of universal networking that provided the impetus for one of his successors, Robert Taylor, to initiate the ARPANET development. Licklider later returned to lead the IPTO in 1973 for two years.


title: History of the Internet

text: The issue of connecting separate physical networks to form one logical network was the first of many problems. Early networks used message switched systems that required rigid routing structures prone to single point of failure. In the 1960s, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation produced a study of survivable networks for the U.S. military in the event of nuclear war. Information transmitted across Baran's network would be divided into what he called "message blocks". Independently, Donald Davies (National Physical Laboratory, UK), proposed and put into practice a local area network based on what he called packet switching, the term that would ultimately be adopted.


title: History of the Internet

text: Packet switching is a rapid store and forward networking design that divides messages up into arbitrary packets, with routing decisions made per-packet. It provides better bandwidth utilization and response times than the traditional circuit-switching technology used for telephony, particularly on resource-limited interconnection links.


title: History of the Internet

text: Following discussions with J. C. R. Licklider in 1965, Donald Davies became interested in data communications for computer networks. Later that year, at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Davies designed and proposed a national commercial data network based on packet switching. The following year, he described the use of an "Interface computer" to act as a router. The proposal was not taken up nationally but he produced a design for a local network to serve the needs of NPL and prove the feasibility of packet switching using high-speed data transmission. To deal with packet permutations (due to dynamically updated route preferences) and to datagram losses (unavoidable when fast sources send to a slow destinations), he assumed that "all users of the network will provide themselves with some kind of error control", thus inventing what came to be known the end-to-end principle. He and his team were one of the first to use the term 'protocol' in a data-commutation context in 1967. The network's development was described at a 1968 conference.


title: History of the Internet

text: By 1968, Davies had begun building the Mark I packet-switched network to meet the needs of the multidisciplinary laboratory and prove the technology under operational conditions. The NPL local network and the ARPANET were the first two networks in the world to use packet switching, and the NPL network was the first to use high-speed links. Many other packet switching networks built in the 1970s were similar "in nearly all respects" to Davies' original 1965 design. The NPL team carried out simulation work on packet networks, including datagram networks, and research into internetworking and computer network security. The Mark II version which operated from 1973 used a layered protocol architecture. In 1976, 12 computers and 75 terminal devices were attached, and more were added until the network was replaced in 1986.


title: History of the Internet

text: Robert Taylor was promoted to the head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1966. He intended to realize Licklider's ideas of an interconnected networking system. As part of the IPTO's role, three network terminals had been installed: one for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at University of California, Berkeley, and one for the Compatible Time-Sharing System project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Taylor's identified need for networking became obvious from the waste of resources apparent to him.


title: History of the Internet

text: Bringing in Larry Roberts from MIT in January 1967, he initiated a project to build such a network. Roberts and Thomas Merrill had been researching computer time-sharing over wide area networks (WANs). Wide area networks emerged during the 1950s and became established during the 1960s. At the first ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967, Roberts presented a proposal for the "ARPA net", based on Wesley Clark's proposal to use Interface Message Processors to create a message switching network. At the conference, Roger Scantlebury presented Donald Davies' work on packet switching for data communications and mentioned the work of Paul Baran at RAND. Roberts incorporated the packet switching concepts into the ARPANET design and upgraded the proposed communications speed from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. Leonard Kleinrock subsequently developed the mathematical theory behind the performance of this technology building on his earlier work on queueing theory.


title: History of the Internet

text: ARPA awarded the contract to build the network to Bolt Beranek & Newman, and the first ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) at 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969.


title: History of the Internet

text: By December 1969, a four-node network was connected by adding the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the same year, Taylor helped fund ALOHAnet, a system designed by professor Norman Abramson and others at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa that transmitted data by radio between seven computers on four islands on Hawaii.


title: History of the Internet

text: Steve Crocker formed a "Networking Working Group" in 1969 at UCLA. ARPANET development was centered around the Request for Comments (RFC) process, still used today for proposing and distributing Internet Protocols and Systems. RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker and published on April 7, 1969. The protocol for establishing links between network sites in the ARPANET, the Network Control Protocol (NCP), was completed in 1970. These early years were documented in the 1972 film .


title: History of the Internet

text: Early international collaborations on the ARPANET were sparse. Connections were made in 1973 to the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR), via a satellite link at the Tanum Earth Station in Sweden, and to Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London, which provided a gateway to British academic networks, forming the first international resource sharing network. By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213. The ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used.


title: History of the Internet

text: The Merit Network was formed in 1966 as the Michigan Educational Research Information Triad to explore computer networking between three of Michigan's public universities as a means to help the state's educational and economic development. With initial support from the State of Michigan and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the packet-switched network was first demonstrated in December 1971 when an interactive host to host connection was made between the IBM mainframe computer systems at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Wayne State University in Detroit. In October 1972 connections to the CDC mainframe at Michigan State University in East Lansing completed the triad. Over the next several years in addition to host to host interactive connections the network was enhanced to support terminal to host connections, host to host batch connections (remote job submission, remote printing, batch file transfer), interactive file transfer, gateways to the Tymnet and Telenet public data networks, X.25 host attachments, gateways to X.25 data networks, Ethernet attached hosts, and eventually TCP/IP and additional public universities in Michigan join the network. All of this set the stage for Merit's role in the NSFNET project starting in the mid-1980s.


title: History of the Internet

text: The CYCLADES packet switching network was a French research network designed and directed by Louis Pouzin. He developed the network to explore alternatives to the early ARPANET design and to support internetworking research. First demonstrated in 1973, it was the first network to implement the end-to-end principle conceived by Donald Davies and make the hosts responsible for reliable delivery of data, rather than the network itself, using unreliable datagrams. Concepts implemented in this network influenced TCP/IP architecture.


title: History of the Internet

text: Based on international research initiatives, particularly the contributions of Rémi Després, packet switching network standards were developed by the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T) in the form of X.25 and related standards. X.25 is built on the concept of virtual circuits emulating traditional telephone connections. In 1974, X.25 formed the basis for the SERCnet network between British academic and research sites, which later became JANET, the United Kingdom's high-speed national research and education network (NREN). The initial ITU Standard on X.25 was approved in March 1976. Existing networks, such as Telenet in the United States adopted X.25 as well as new public data networks, such as DATAPAC in Canada. X.25 was supplemented by the X.75 protocol which enabled internetworking.


title: History of the Internet

text: The British Post Office, Western Union International and Tymnet collaborated to create the first international packet switched network, referred to as the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS), in 1978. This network grew from Europe and the US to cover Canada, Hong Kong, and Australia by 1981. By the 1990s it provided a worldwide networking infrastructure.


title: History of the Internet

text: Unlike ARPANET, X.25 was commonly available for business use. Telenet offered its Telemail electronic mail service, which was also targeted to enterprise use rather than the general email system of the ARPANET.


title: History of the Internet

text: The first public dial-in networks used asynchronous TTY terminal protocols to reach a concentrator operated in the public network. Some networks, such as Telenet and CompuServe, used X.25 to multiplex the terminal sessions into their packet-switched backbones, while others, such as Tymnet, used proprietary protocols. In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to offer electronic mail capabilities and technical support to personal computer users. The company broke new ground again in 1980 as the first to offer real-time chat with its CB Simulator. Other major dial-in networks were America Online (AOL) and Prodigy that also provided communications, content, and entertainment features. Many bulletin board system (BBS) networks also provided on-line access, such as FidoNet which was popular amongst hobbyist computer users, many of them hackers and amateur radio operators.


title: History of the Internet

text: In 1979, two students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, originated the idea of using Bourne shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line UUCP connection with nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Following public release of the software in 1980, the mesh of UUCP hosts forwarding on the Usenet news rapidly expanded. UUCPnet, as it would later be named, also created gateways and links between FidoNet and dial-up BBS hosts. UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections, and the lack of strict use policies compared to later networks like CSNET and Bitnet. All connects were local. By 1981 the number of UUCP hosts had grown to 550, nearly doubling to 940 in 1984.


title: History of the Internet

text: Sublink Network, operating since 1987 and officially founded in Italy in 1989, based its interconnectivity upon UUCP to redistribute mail and news groups messages throughout its Italian nodes (about 100 at the time) owned both by private individuals and small companies. Sublink Network represented possibly one of the first examples of the Internet technology becoming progress through popular diffusion.


title: History of the Internet

text: With so many different network methods, something was needed to unify them. Louis Pouzin initiated the CYCLADES project in 1971, building on the work of Donald Davies. In his work, Pouzin coined the term "catenet" for concatenated network. An International Networking Working Group formed in 1972; active members included Vint Cerf from Stanford University, Alex McKenzie from BBN, Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury from NPL, and Louis Pouzin and Hubert Zimmermann from IRIA. Later that year, Bob Kahn of DARPA recruited Vint Cerf to work with him on the problem. Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC outlined the idea of Ethernet. By 1973, these groups had worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the ARPANET, the hosts became responsible.


title: History of the Internet

text: Kahn and Cerf published their ideas in May 1974, which incorporated concepts implemented by Louis Pouzin and Hubert Zimmermann in the CYCLADES network. The specification of the resulting protocol, the Transmission Control Program, was published as by the Network Working Group in December 1974. It contains the first attested use of the term "internet", as a shorthand for internetwork. This software was monolithic in design using two simplex communication channels for each user session.


title: History of the Internet

text: With the role of the network reduced to a core of functionality, it became possible to exchange traffic with other networks independently from their detailed characteristics, thereby solving the fundamental problems of internetworking. DARPA agreed to fund development of prototype software. Testing began in 1975 through concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN and University College London (UCL). After several years of work, the first demonstration of a gateway between the Packet Radio network (PRNET) in the SF Bay area and the ARPANET was conducted by the Stanford Research Institute. On November 22, 1977, a three network demonstration was conducted including the ARPANET, the SRI's Packet Radio Van on the Packet Radio Network and the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network (SATNET) including a node at UCL.


title: History of the Internet

text: The software was redesigned as a modular protocol stack, using full-duplex channels; between 1976 and 1977, Yogen Dalal and Robert Metcalfe among others, proposed separating TCP's routing and transmission control functions into two discrete layers, which led to the splitting of the Transmission Control Program into the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the IP protocol (IP) in version 3 in 1978. Originally referred to as "IP/TCP", version 4 was described in IETF publication RFC 791 (September 1981), 792 and 793. It was installed on SATNET in 1982 and the ARPANET in January 1983 after the DoD made it standard for all military computer networking. This resulted in a networking model that became known informally as TCP/IP. It was also referred to as the Department of Defense (DoD) model, DARPA model, or ARPANET model. Cerf credits his graduate students Yogen Dalal, Carl Sunshine, Judy Estrin, Richard Karp, and Gérard Le Lann with important work on the design and testing. DARPA sponsored or encouraged the development of TCP/IP implementations for many operating systems.


title: History of the Internet

text: After the ARPANET had been up and running for several years, ARPA looked for another agency to hand off the network to; ARPA's primary mission was funding cutting-edge research and development, not running a communications utility. Eventually, in July 1975, the network had been turned over to the Defense Communications Agency, also part of the Department of Defense. In 1983, the U.S. military portion of the ARPANET was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET. MILNET subsequently became the unclassified but military-only NIPRNET, in parallel with the SECRET-level SIPRNET and JWICS for TOP SECRET and above. NIPRNET does have controlled security gateways to the public Internet.


title: History of the Internet

text: The networks based on the ARPANET were government funded and therefore restricted to noncommercial uses such as research; unrelated commercial use was strictly forbidden. This initially restricted connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, which began to form networks of fiber optic lines. A growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were. Data transmission speeds depended upon the type of connection, the slowest being analog telephone lines and the fastest using optical networking technology.


title: History of the Internet

text: Several other branches of the U.S. government, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE) became heavily involved in Internet research and started development of a successor to ARPANET. In the mid-1980s, all three of these branches developed the first Wide Area Networks based on TCP/IP. NASA developed the NASA Science Network, NSF developed CSNET and DOE evolved the Energy Sciences Network or ESNet.


title: History of the Internet

text: NASA developed the TCP/IP based NASA Science Network (NSN) in the mid-1980s, connecting space scientists to data and information stored anywhere in the world. In 1989, the DECnet-based Space Physics Analysis Network (SPAN) and the TCP/IP-based NASA Science Network (NSN) were brought together at NASA Ames Research Center creating the first multiprotocol wide area network called the NASA Science Internet, or NSI. NSI was established to provide a totally integrated communications infrastructure to the NASA scientific community for the advancement of earth, space and life sciences. As a high-speed, multiprotocol, international network, NSI provided connectivity to over 20,000 scientists across all seven continents.


title: History of the Internet

text: In 1981, NSF supported the development of the Computer Science Network (CSNET). CSNET connected with ARPANET using TCP/IP, and ran TCP/IP over X.25, but it also supported departments without sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. CSNET played a central role in popularizing the Internet outside the ARPANET.


title: History of the Internet

text: In 1986, the NSF created NSFNET, a 56 kbit/s backbone to support the NSF-sponsored supercomputing centers. The NSFNET also provided support for the creation of regional research and education networks in the United States, and for the connection of university and college campus networks to the regional networks. The use of NSFNET and the regional networks was not limited to supercomputer users and the 56 kbit/s network quickly became overloaded. NSFNET was upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s in 1988 under a cooperative agreement with the Merit Network in partnership with IBM, MCI, and the State of Michigan. The existence of NSFNET and the creation of Federal Internet Exchanges (FIXes) allowed the ARPANET to be decommissioned in 1990.


title: History of the Internet

text: NSFNET was expanded and upgraded to dedicated fiber, optical lasers and optical amplifier systems capable of delivering T3 start up speeds or 45 Mbit/s in 1991. However, the T3 transition by MCI took longer than expected, allowing Sprint to establish a coast-to-coast long-distance commercial Internet service. When NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, its optical networking backbones were handed off to several commercial Internet service providers, including MCI, PSI Net and Sprint. As a result, when the handoff was complete, Sprint and its Washington DC Network Access Points began to carry Internet traffic, and by 1996, Sprint was the world's largest carrier of Internet traffic.


title: History of the Internet

text: The research and academic community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as Internet2 in the United States and JANET in the United Kingdom.


title: History of the Internet

text: The term "internet" was reflected in the first RFC published on the TCP protocol (RFC 675: Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974) as a short form of "internetworking", when the two terms were used interchangeably. In general, an internet was a collection of networks linked by a common protocol. In the time period when the ARPANET was connected to the newly formed NSFNET project in the late 1980s, the term was used as the name of the network, Internet, being the large and global TCP/IP network.


title: History of the Internet

text: Opening the Internet and the fiber optic backbone to corporate and consumers increased demand for network capacity. The expense and delay of laying new fiber led providers to test a fiber bandwidth expansion alternative that had been pioneered in the late 1970s by Optelecom using “interactions between light and matter, such as lasers and optical devices used for optical amplification and wave mixing”. This technology became known as wave division multiplexing (WDM). Bell Labs deployed a 4-channel WDM system in 1995. To develop a mass capacity (dense) WDM system, Optelecom and its former head of Light Systems Research, David R. Huber formed a new venture, Ciena Corp., that deployed the world's first dense WDM system on the Sprint fiber network in June 1996. This was referred to as the real start of optical networking.


title: History of the Internet

text: As interest in networking grew by needs of collaboration, exchange of data, and access of remote computing resources, the Internet technologies spread throughout the rest of the world. The hardware-agnostic approach in TCP/IP supported the use of existing network infrastructure, such as the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS) X.25 network, to carry Internet traffic.


title: History of the Internet

text: Many sites unable to link directly to the Internet created simple gateways for the transfer of electronic mail, the most important application of the time. Sites with only intermittent connections used UUCP or FidoNet and relied on the gateways between these networks and the Internet. Some gateway services went beyond simple mail peering, such as allowing access to File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites via UUCP or mail.


title: History of the Internet

text: Finally, routing technologies were developed for the Internet to remove the remaining centralized routing aspects. The Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) was replaced by a new protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This provided a meshed topology for the Internet and reduced the centric architecture which ARPANET had emphasized. In 1994, Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) was introduced to support better conservation of address space which allowed use of route aggregation to decrease the size of routing tables.


title: History of the Internet

text: To address the need for transmission capacity beyond that provided by radio, satellite and analog copper telephone lines, engineers developed optical communications systems based on fiber optic cables powered by lasers and optical amplifier techniques.


title: History of the Internet

text: The concept of lasing arose from a 1917 paper by Albert Einstein, “On the Quantum Theory of Radiation.” Einstein expanded upon a dialog with Max Planck on how atoms absorb and emit light, part of a thought process that, with input from Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and others, gave rise to Quantum Mechanics. Specifically, in his quantum theory, Einstein mathematically determined that light could be generated not only by spontaneous emission, such as the light emitted by an incandescent light or the Sun, but also by stimulated emission.


title: History of the Internet

text: Forty years later, on November 13, 1957, Columbia University physics student Gordon Gould first realized how to make light by stimulated emission through a process of optical amplification. He coined the term LASER for this technology—Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Using Gould's light amplification method (patented as “Optically Pumped Laser Amplifier”) , Theodore Maiman made the first working laser on May 16, 1960.


title: History of the Internet

text: Gould co-founded Optelecom, Inc. in 1973 to commercialize his inventions in optical fiber telecommunications. just as Corning Glass was producing the first commercial fiber optic cable in small quantities. Optelecom configured its own fiber lasers and optical amplifiers into the first commercial optical communication systems which it delivered to Chevron and the US Army Missile Defense. Three years later, GTE deployed the first optical telephone system in 1977 in Long Beach, California. By the early 1980s, optical networks powered by lasers, LED and optical amplifier equipment supplied by Bell Labs, NTT and Perelli were used by select universities and long-distance telephone providers.


title: History of the Internet

text: In early 1982, NORSAR and Peter Kirstein's group at University College London (UCL) left the ARPANET and began to use TCP/IP over SATNET. UCL continued to provide access between the ARPANET and academic networks in the UK, a role it had performed since 1973.


title: History of the Internet

text: Between 1984 and 1988, CERN began installation and operation of TCP/IP to interconnect its major internal computer systems, workstations, PCs, and an accelerator control system. CERN continued to operate a limited self-developed system (CERNET) internally and several incompatible (typically proprietary) network protocols externally. There was considerable resistance in Europe towards more widespread use of TCP/IP, and the CERN TCP/IP intranets remained isolated from the Internet until 1989, when a transatlantic connection to Cornell University was established.


title: History of the Internet

text: The Computer Science Network (CSNET) began operation in 1981 to provide networking connections to institutions that could not connect directly to ARPANET. Its first international connection was to Israel in 1984. Soon after, connections were established to computer science departments in Canada, France, and Germany.


title: History of the Internet

text: In 1988, the first international connections to NSFNET was established by France's INRIA, and Piet Beertema at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands. Daniel Karrenberg, from CWI, visited Ben Segal, CERN's TCP/IP coordinator, looking for advice about the transition of EUnet, the European side of the UUCP Usenet network (much of which ran over X.25 links), over to TCP/IP. The previous year, Segal had met with Len Bosack from the then still small company Cisco about purchasing some TCP/IP routers for CERN, and Segal was able to give Karrenberg advice and forward him on to Cisco for the appropriate hardware. This expanded the European portion of the Internet across the existing UUCP networks. The NORDUnet connection to NSFNET was in place soon after, providing open access for university students in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. In January 1989, CERN opened its first external TCP/IP connections. This coincided with the creation of Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE), initially a group of IP network administrators who met regularly to carry out coordination work together. Later, in 1992, RIPE was formally registered as a cooperative in Amsterdam.


title: History of the Internet

text: The United Kingdom's national research and education network, JANET, began operation in 1984 using the UK's Coloured Book protocols and connected to NSFNET in 1989. In 1991, JANET adopted Internet Protocol on the existing network. The same year, Dai Davies introduced Internet technology into the pan-European NREN, EuropaNet, which was built on the X.25 protocol. The European Academic and Research Network (EARN) and RARE adopted IP around the same time, and the European Internet backbone EBONE became operational in 1992.


title: History of the Internet

text: Nonetheless, for a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, engineers, organizations and nations were polarized over the issue of which standard, the OSI model or the Internet protocol suite would result in the best and most robust computer networks.


title: History of the Internet

text: South Korea set up a two-node domestic TCP/IP network in 1982, the System Development Network (SDN), adding a third node the following year. SDN was connected to the rest of the world in August 1983 using UUCP (Unix-to-Unix-Copy); connected to CSNET in December 1984; and formally connected to the NSFNET in 1990.


title: History of the Internet

text: Japan, which had built the UUCP-based network JUNET in 1984, connected to CSNET, and later to NSFNET in 1989, marking the spread of the Internet to Asia.


title: History of the Internet

text: In Australia, ad hoc networking to ARPA and in-between Australian universities formed in the late 1980s, based on various technologies such as X.25, UUCPNet, and via a CSNET. These were limited in their connection to the global networks, due to the cost of making individual international UUCP dial-up or X.25 connections. In 1989, Australian universities joined the push towards using IP protocols to unify their networking infrastructures. AARNet was formed in 1989 by the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee and provided a dedicated IP based network for Australia.


title: History of the Internet

text: New Zealand adopted the UK's Coloured Book protocols as an interim standard and established its first international IP connection to the U.S. in 1989.


title: History of the Internet

text: While developed countries with technological infrastructures were joining the Internet, developing countries began to experience a digital divide separating them from the Internet. On an essentially continental basis, they built organizations for Internet resource administration and to share operational experience, which enabled more transmission facilities to be put into place.


title: History of the Internet

text: At the beginning of the 1990s, African countries relied upon X.25 IPSS and 2400 baud modem UUCP links for international and internetwork computer communications.


title: History of the Internet

text: In August 1995, InfoMail Uganda, Ltd., a privately held firm in Kampala now known as InfoCom, and NSN Network Services of Avon, Colorado, sold in 1997 and now known as Clear Channel Satellite, established Africa's first native TCP/IP high-speed satellite Internet services. The data connection was originally carried by a C-Band RSCC Russian satellite which connected InfoMail's Kampala offices directly to NSN's MAE-West point of presence using a private network from NSN's leased ground station in New Jersey. InfoCom's first satellite connection was just 64 kbit/s, serving a Sun host computer and twelve US Robotics dial-up modems.


title: History of the Internet

text: In 1996, a USAID funded project, the Leland Initiative, started work on developing full Internet connectivity for the continent. Guinea, Mozambique, Madagascar and Rwanda gained satellite earth stations in 1997, followed by Ivory Coast and Benin in 1998.


title: History of the Internet

text: Africa is building an Internet infrastructure. AFRINIC, headquartered in Mauritius, manages IP address allocation for the continent. As do the other Internet regions, there is an operational forum, the Internet Community of Operational Networking Specialists.


title: History of the Internet

text: There are many programs to provide high-performance transmission plant, and the western and southern coasts have undersea optical cable. High-speed cables join North Africa and the Horn of Africa to intercontinental cable systems. Undersea cable development is slower for East Africa; the original joint effort between New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the East Africa Submarine System (Eassy) has broken off and may become two efforts.


title: History of the Internet

text: The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), headquartered in Australia, manages IP address allocation for the continent. APNIC sponsors an operational forum, the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT).


title: History of the Internet

text: In South Korea, VDSL, a last mile technology developed in the 1990s by NextLevel Communications, connected corporate and consumer copper-based telephone lines to the Internet.


title: History of the Internet

text: The People's Republic of China established its first TCP/IP college network, Tsinghua University's TUNET in 1991. The PRC went on to make its first global Internet connection in 1994, between the Beijing Electro-Spectrometer Collaboration and Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center. However, China went on to implement its own digital divide by implementing a country-wide content filter.


title: History of the Internet

text: Japan hosted the annual meeting of the Internet Society, INET'92, in Kobe. Singapore developed TECHNET in 1990, and Thailand gained a global Internet connection between Chulalongkorn University and UUNET in 1992.


title: History of the Internet

text: As with the other regions, the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) manages the IP address space and other resources for its area. LACNIC, headquartered in Uruguay, operates DNS root, reverse DNS, and other key services.


title: History of the Internet

text: Initially, as with its predecessor networks, the system that would evolve into the Internet was primarily for government and government body use. Although commercial use was forbidden, the exact definition of commercial use was unclear and subjective. UUCPNet and the X.25 IPSS had no such restrictions, which would eventually see the official barring of UUCPNet use of ARPANET and NSFNET connections. (Some UUCP links still remained connecting to these networks however, as administrators cast a blind eye to their operation.)


title: History of the Internet

text: As a result, during the late 1980s, the first Internet service provider (ISP) companies were formed. Companies like PSINet, UUNET, Netcom, and Portal Software were formed to provide service to the regional research networks and provide alternate network access, UUCP-based email and Usenet News to the public. The first commercial dialup ISP in the United States was The World, which opened in 1989.


title: History of the Internet

text: In 1992, the U.S. Congress passed the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, , which allowed NSF to support access by the research and education communities to computer networks which were not used exclusively for research and education purposes, thus permitting NSFNET to interconnect with commercial networks. This caused controversy within the research and education community, who were concerned commercial use of the network might lead to an Internet that was less responsive to their needs, and within the community of commercial network providers, who felt that government subsidies were giving an unfair advantage to some organizations.


title: History of the Internet

text: By 1990, ARPANET's goals had been fulfilled and new networking technologies exceeded the original scope and the project came to a close. New network service providers including PSINet, Alternet, CERFNet, ANS CO+RE, and many others were offering network access to commercial customers. NSFNET was no longer the de facto backbone and exchange point of the Internet. The Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX), Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAEs), and later Network Access Points (NAPs) were becoming the primary interconnections between many networks. The final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic ended on April 30, 1995, when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the NSFNET Backbone Service. NSF provided initial support for the NAPs and interim support to help the regional research and education networks transition to commercial ISPs. NSF also sponsored the very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) which continued to provide support for the supercomputing centers and research and education in the United States.


title: History of the Internet

text: An event held on 11 January 1994, "The Superhighway Summit" at UCLA's Royce Hall, was the "first public conference bringing together all of the major industry, government and academic leaders in the field [and] also began the national dialogue about the "Information Superhighway" and its implications".


title: History of the Internet

text: During the first decade or so of the public Internet, the immense changes it would eventually enable in the 2000s were still nascent. In terms of providing context for this period, mobile cellular devices ("smartphones" and other cellular devices) which today provide near-universal access, were used for business and not a routine household item owned by parents and children worldwide. Social media in the modern sense had yet to come into existence, laptops were bulky and most households did not have computers. Data rates were slow and most people lacked means to video or digitize video; media storage was transitioning slowly from analog tape to digital optical discs (DVD and to an extent still, floppy disc to CD). Enabling technologies used from the early 2000s such as PHP, modern JavaScript and Java, technologies such as AJAX, HTML 4 (and its emphasis on CSS), and various software frameworks, which enabled and simplified speed of web development, largely awaited invention and their eventual widespread adoption.


title: History of the Internet

text: The Internet was widely used for mailing lists, emails, e-commerce and early popular online shopping (Amazon and eBay for example), online forums and bulletin boards, and personal websites and blogs, and use was growing rapidly, but by more modern standards the systems used were static and lacked widespread social engagement. It awaited a number of events in the early 2000s to change from a communications technology to gradually develop into a key part of global society's infrastructure.


title: History of the Internet

text: Typical design elements of these "Web 1.0" era websites included: Static pages instead of dynamic HTML; content served from filesystems instead of relational databases; pages built using Server Side Includes or CGI instead of a web application written in a dynamic programming language; HTML 3.2-era structures such as frames and tables to create page layouts; online guestbooks; overuse of GIF buttons and similar small graphics promoting particular items; and HTML forms sent via email. (Support for server side scripting was rare on shared servers so the usual feedback mechanism was via email, using mailto forms and their email program.


title: History of the Internet

text: During the period 1997 to 2001, the first speculative investment bubble related to the Internet took place, in which "dot-com" companies (referring to the ".com" top level domain used by businesses) were propelled to exceedingly high valuations as investors rapidly stoked stock values, followed by a market crash; the first dot-com bubble. However this only temporarily slowed enthusiasm and growth, which quickly recovered and continued to grow.


title: History of the Internet

text: With the call to Web 2.0 following soon afterward, the period of the Internet up to around 2004–2005 was retrospectively named and described by some as Web 1.0.


title: History of the Internet

text: The last available IPv4 address was assigned in January 2011. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses which limits the address space to 2 addresses, i.e. addresses. IPv4 is being replaced by its successor, called "IPv6", which uses 128 bit addresses, providing 2 addresses, i.e. , a vastly increased address space. The shift to IPv6 is expected to take many years, decades, or perhaps longer, to complete, since there were four billion machines with IPv4 when the shift began.


title: History of the Internet

text: The changes that would propel the Internet into its place as a social system took place during a relatively short period of no more than five years, from around 2005 to 2010. They included:


title: History of the Internet

text: The term "Web 2.0" describes websites that emphasize user-generated content (including user-to-user interaction), usability, and interoperability. It first appeared in a January 1999 article called "Fragmented Future" written by Darcy DiNucci, a consultant on electronic information design, where she wrote:


title: History of the Internet

text: The term resurfaced during 2002–2004, and gained prominence in late 2004 following presentations by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the first Web 2.0 Conference. In their opening remarks, John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly outlined their definition of the "Web as Platform", where software applications are built upon the Web as opposed to upon the desktop. The unique aspect of this migration, they argued, is that "customers are building your business for you". They argued that the activities of users generating content (in the form of ideas, text, videos, or pictures) could be "harnessed" to create value.


title: History of the Internet

text: Web 2.0 does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to cumulative changes in the way Web pages are made and used. Web 2.0 describes an approach, in which sites focus substantially upon allowing users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to Web sites where people are limited to the passive viewing of content. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking services, blogs, wikis, folksonomies, video sharing sites, hosted services, Web applications, and mashups. Terry Flew, in his 3rd Edition of "New Media" described what he believed to characterize the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:


title: History of the Internet

text: This era saw several household names gain prominence through their community-oriented operation – YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Wikipedia being some examples.


title: History of the Internet

text: The process of change that generally coincided with "Web 2.0" was itself greatly accelerated and transformed only a short time later by the increasing growth in mobile devices. This mobile revolution meant that computers in the form of smartphones became something many people used, took with them everywhere, communicated with, used for photographs and videos they instantly shared or to shop or seek information "on the move" – and used socially, as opposed to items on a desk at home or just used for work.


title: History of the Internet

text: Location-based services, services using location and other sensor information, and crowdsourcing (frequently but not always location based), became common, with posts tagged by location, or websites and services becoming location aware. Mobile-targeted websites (such as "m.website.com") became common, designed especially for the new devices used. Netbooks, ultrabooks, widespread 4G and Wi-Fi, and mobile chips capable or running at nearly the power of desktops from not many years before on far lower power usage, became enablers of this stage of Internet development, and the term "App" emerged (short for "Application program" or "Program") as did the "App store".


title: History of the Internet

text: This "mobile revolution" has allowed for people to have a nearly unlimited amount of information at their fingertips. With the ability to access the internet from cell phones came a change in the way we consume media. In fact, looking at media consumption statistics, over half of media consumption between those aged 18 and 34 were using a smartphone.


title: History of the Internet

text: The first Internet link into low Earth orbit was established on January 22, 2010, when astronaut T. J. Creamer posted the first unassisted update to his Twitter account from the International Space Station, marking the extension of the Internet into space. (Astronauts at the ISS had used email and Twitter before, but these messages had been relayed to the ground through a NASA data link before being posted by a human proxy.) This personal Web access, which NASA calls the Crew Support LAN, uses the space station's high-speed Ku band microwave link. To surf the Web, astronauts can use a station laptop computer to control a desktop computer on Earth, and they can talk to their families and friends on Earth using Voice over IP equipment.


title: History of the Internet

text: Communication with spacecraft beyond Earth orbit has traditionally been over point-to-point links through the Deep Space Network. Each such data link must be manually scheduled and configured. In the late 1990s NASA and Google began working on a new network protocol, Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) which automates this process, allows networking of spaceborne transmission nodes, and takes the fact into account that spacecraft can temporarily lose contact because they move behind the Moon or planets, or because space weather disrupts the connection. Under such conditions, DTN retransmits data packages instead of dropping them, as the standard TCP/IP Internet Protocol does. NASA conducted the first field test of what it calls the "deep space internet" in November 2008. Testing of DTN-based communications between the International Space Station and Earth (now termed Disruption-Tolerant Networking) has been ongoing since March 2009, and is scheduled to continue until March 2014.


title: History of the Internet

text: This network technology is supposed to ultimately enable missions that involve multiple spacecraft where reliable inter-vessel communication might take precedence over vessel-to-Earth downlinks. According to a February 2011 statement by Google's Vint Cerf, the so-called "Bundle protocols" have been uploaded to NASA's EPOXI mission spacecraft (which is in orbit around the Sun) and communication with Earth has been tested at a distance of approximately 80 light seconds.


title: History of the Internet

text: As a globally distributed network of voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks, the Internet operates without a central governing body. Each constituent network chooses the technologies and protocols it deploys from the technical standards that are developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). However, successful interoperation of many networks requires certain parameters that must be common throughout the network. For managing such parameters, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) oversees the allocation and assignment of various technical identifiers. In addition, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) provides oversight and coordination for the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System.


title: History of the Internet

text: The IANA function was originally performed by USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI), and it delegated portions of this responsibility with respect to numeric network and autonomous system identifiers to the Network Information Center (NIC) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) in Menlo Park, California. ISI's Jonathan Postel managed the IANA, served as RFC Editor and performed other key roles until his premature death in 1998.


title: History of the Internet

text: As the early ARPANET grew, hosts were referred to by names, and a HOSTS.TXT file would be distributed from SRI International to each host on the network. As the network grew, this became cumbersome. A technical solution came in the form of the Domain Name System, created by ISI's Paul Mockapetris in 1983. The Defense Data Network—Network Information Center (DDN-NIC) at SRI handled all registration services, including the top-level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .net, .com and .us, root nameserver administration and Internet number assignments under a United States Department of Defense contract. In 1991, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) awarded the administration and maintenance of DDN-NIC (managed by SRI up until this point) to Government Systems, Inc., who subcontracted it to the small private-sector Network Solutions, Inc.


title: History of the Internet

text: The increasing cultural diversity of the Internet also posed administrative challenges for centralized management of the IP addresses. In October 1992, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published RFC 1366, which described the "growth of the Internet and its increasing globalization" and set out the basis for an evolution of the IP registry process, based on a regionally distributed registry model. This document stressed the need for a single Internet number registry to exist in each geographical region of the world (which would be of "continental dimensions"). Registries would be "unbiased and widely recognized by network providers and subscribers" within their region.


title: History of the Internet

text: The RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) was established as the first RIR in May 1992. The second RIR, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), was established in Tokyo in 1993, as a pilot project of the Asia Pacific Networking Group.


title: History of the Internet

text: Since at this point in history most of the growth on the Internet was coming from non-military sources, it was decided that the Department of Defense would no longer fund registration services outside of the .mil TLD. In 1993 the U.S. National Science Foundation, after a competitive bidding process in 1992, created the InterNIC to manage the allocations of addresses and management of the address databases, and awarded the contract to three organizations. Registration Services would be provided by Network Solutions; Directory and Database Services would be provided by AT&T; and Information Services would be provided by General Atomics.


title: History of the Internet

text: Over time, after consultation with the IANA, the IETF, RIPE NCC, APNIC, and the Federal Networking Council (FNC), the decision was made to separate the management of domain names from the management of IP numbers. Following the examples of RIPE NCC and APNIC, it was recommended that management of IP address space then administered by the InterNIC should be under the control of those that use it, specifically the ISPs, end-user organizations, corporate entities, universities, and individuals. As a result, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) was established as in December 1997, as an independent, not-for-profit corporation by direction of the National Science Foundation and became the third Regional Internet Registry.


title: History of the Internet

text: In 1998, both the IANA and remaining DNS-related InterNIC functions were reorganized under the control of ICANN, a California non-profit corporation contracted by the United States Department of Commerce to manage a number of Internet-related tasks. As these tasks involved technical coordination for two principal Internet name spaces (DNS names and IP addresses) created by the IETF, ICANN also signed a memorandum of understanding with the IAB to define the technical work to be carried out by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. The management of Internet address space remained with the regional Internet registries, which collectively were defined as a supporting organization within the ICANN structure. ICANN provides central coordination for the DNS system, including policy coordination for the split registry / registrar system, with competition among registry service providers to serve each top-level-domain and multiple competing registrars offering DNS services to end-users.


title: History of the Internet

text: The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the largest and most visible of several loosely related ad-hoc groups that provide technical direction for the Internet, including the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF).


title: History of the Internet

text: The IETF is a loosely self-organized group of international volunteers who contribute to the engineering and evolution of Internet technologies. It is the principal body engaged in the development of new Internet standard specifications. Much of the work of the IETF is organized into "Working Groups". Standardization efforts of the Working Groups are often adopted by the Internet community, but the IETF does not control or patrol the Internet.


title: History of the Internet

text: The IETF grew out of quarterly meetings with U.S. government-funded researchers, starting in January 1986. Non-government representatives were invited by the fourth IETF meeting in October 1986. The concept of Working Groups was introduced at the fifth meeting in February 1987. The seventh meeting in July 1987 was the first meeting with more than one hundred attendees. In 1992, the Internet Society, a professional membership society, was formed and IETF began to operate under it as an independent international standards body. The first IETF meeting outside of the United States was held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in July 1993. Today, the IETF meets three times per year and attendance has been as high as ca. 2,000 participants. Typically one in three IETF meetings are held in Europe or Asia. The number of non-US attendees is typically ca. 50%, even at meetings held in the United States.


title: History of the Internet

text: The IETF is not a legal entity, has no governing board, no members, and no dues. The closest status resembling membership is being on an IETF or Working Group mailing list. IETF volunteers come from all over the world and from many different parts of the Internet community. The IETF works closely with and under the supervision of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) and the Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG), peer activities to the IETF and IESG under the general supervision of the IAB, focus on longer-term research issues.


title: History of the Internet

text: Request for Comments (RFCs) are the main documentation for the work of the IAB, IESG, IETF, and IRTF. RFC 1, "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker at UCLA in April 1969, well before the IETF was created. Originally they were technical memos documenting aspects of ARPANET development and were edited by Jon Postel, the first RFC Editor.


title: History of the Internet

text: RFCs cover a wide range of information from proposed standards, draft standards, full standards, best practices, experimental protocols, history, and other informational topics. RFCs can be written by individuals or informal groups of individuals, but many are the product of a more formal Working Group. Drafts are submitted to the IESG either by individuals or by the Working Group Chair. An RFC Editor, appointed by the IAB, separate from IANA, and working in conjunction with the IESG, receives drafts from the IESG and edits, formats, and publishes them. Once an RFC is published, it is never revised. If the standard it describes changes or its information becomes obsolete, the revised standard or updated information will be re-published as a new RFC that "obsoletes" the original.


title: History of the Internet

text: The Internet Society (ISOC) is an international, nonprofit organization founded during 1992 "to assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world". With offices near Washington, DC, USA, and in Geneva, Switzerland, ISOC has a membership base comprising more than 80 organizational and more than 50,000 individual members. Members also form "chapters" based on either common geographical location or special interests. There are currently more than 90 chapters around the world.


title: History of the Internet

text: ISOC provides financial and organizational support to and promotes the work of the standards settings bodies for which it is the organizational home: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). ISOC also promotes understanding and appreciation of the Internet model of open, transparent processes and consensus-based decision-making.


title: History of the Internet

text: Since the 1990s, the Internet's governance and organization has been of global importance to governments, commerce, civil society, and individuals. The organizations which held control of certain technical aspects of the Internet were the successors of the old ARPANET oversight and the current decision-makers in the day-to-day technical aspects of the network. While recognized as the administrators of certain aspects of the Internet, their roles and their decision-making authority are limited and subject to increasing international scrutiny and increasing objections. These objections have led to the ICANN removing themselves from relationships with first the University of Southern California in 2000, and in September 2009, gaining autonomy from the US government by the ending of its longstanding agreements, although some contractual obligations with the U.S. Department of Commerce continued. Finally, on October 1, 2016, ICANN ended its contract with the United States Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), allowing oversight to pass to the global Internet community.


title: History of the Internet

text: The IETF, with financial and organizational support from the Internet Society, continues to serve as the Internet's ad-hoc standards body and issues Request for Comments.


title: History of the Internet

text: In November 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society, held in Tunis, called for an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to be convened by United Nations Secretary General. The IGF opened an ongoing, non-binding conversation among stakeholders representing governments, the private sector, civil society, and the technical and academic communities about the future of Internet governance. The first IGF meeting was held in October/November 2006 with follow up meetings annually thereafter. Since WSIS, the term "Internet governance" has been broadened beyond narrow technical concerns to include a wider range of Internet-related policy issues.


title: History of the Internet

text: Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, was becoming concerned about threats to the web's future and in November 2009 at the IGF in Washington DC launched the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) to campaign to make the web a safe and empowering tool for the good of humanity with access to all. In November 2019 at the IGF in Berlin, Berners-Lee and the WWWF went on to launch the "Contract for the Web", a campaign initiative to persuade governments, companies and citizens to commit to nine principles to stop "misuse" with the warning "If we don't act now - and act together - to prevent the web being misused by those who want to exploit, divide and undermine, we are at risk of squandering" (its potential for good).


title: History of the Internet

text: Due to its prominence and immediacy as an effective means of mass communication, the Internet has also become more politicized as it has grown. This has led in turn, to discourses and activities that would once have taken place in other ways, migrating to being mediated by internet.


title: History of the Internet

text: Examples include political activities such as public protest and canvassing of support and votes, but also:


title: History of the Internet

text: On April 23, 2014, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was reported to be considering a new rule that would permit Internet service providers to offer content providers a faster track to send content, thus reversing their earlier net neutrality position. A possible solution to net neutrality concerns may be municipal broadband, according to Professor Susan Crawford, a legal and technology expert at Harvard Law School. On May 15, 2014, the FCC decided to consider two options regarding Internet services: first, permit fast and slow broadband lanes, thereby compromising net neutrality; and second, reclassify broadband as a telecommunication service, thereby preserving net neutrality. On November 10, 2014, President Obama recommended the FCC reclassify broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service in order to preserve net neutrality. On January 16, 2015, Republicans presented legislation, in the form of a U.S. Congress HR discussion draft bill, that makes concessions to net neutrality but prohibits the FCC from accomplishing the goal or enacting any further regulation affecting Internet service providers (ISPs). On January 31, 2015, AP News reported that the FCC will present the notion of applying ("with some caveats") Title II (common carrier) of the Communications Act of 1934 to the internet in a vote expected on February 26, 2015. Adoption of this notion would reclassify internet service from one of information to one of telecommunications and, according to Tom Wheeler, chairman of the FCC, ensure net neutrality. The FCC is expected to enforce net neutrality in its vote, according to "The New York Times".


title: History of the Internet

text: On February 26, 2015, the FCC ruled in favor of net neutrality by applying Title II (common carrier) of the Communications Act of 1934 and Section 706 of the Telecommunications act of 1996 to the Internet. The FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, commented, "This is no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech. They both stand for the same concept."


title: History of the Internet

text: On March 12, 2015, the FCC released the specific details of the net neutrality rules. On April 13, 2015, the FCC published the final rule on its new "Net Neutrality" regulations.


title: History of the Internet

text: On December 14, 2017, the FCC repealed their March 12, 2015 decision by a 3–2 vote regarding net neutrality rules.


title: History of the Internet

text: E-mail has often been called the killer application of the Internet. It predates the Internet, and was a crucial tool in creating it. Email started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the history is undocumented, among the first systems to have such a facility were the System Development Corporation (SDC) Q32 and the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) at MIT.


title: History of the Internet

text: The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of electronic mail. An experimental inter-system transferred mail on the ARPANET shortly after its creation. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson created what was to become the standard Internet electronic mail addressing format, using the @ sign to separate mailbox names from host names.