Page 10 - DCAP408_WEB_PROGRAMMING

Web Programming

Notes 1.1 Evolution of Internet

How old is the Internet? Here is a short historical background. The concept, which gave birth to
the Internet, as it exists today, started with a project called the ARPANET (around late 1960s)
which was sponsored by the United States Department of Defence, Advanced Research Project
Agency (ARPA). The Department of Defence (DOD) was interested in building a network that
could maintain itself under adverse conditions. The original idea was to build a network capable
of carrying military and government information during a “nuclear event”. Thus, the predecessor
of Internet, as often called ARPANET, came into being.
Till late 1970s, ARPANET operated to provide connection facility to around a dozen of research
sites. Later in 1982, ARPA established the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet
Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, which is a connection protocol
between sites, which is still in use today and is the primary method of connecting to the Internet.

This technique of information access, which started as a method of sharing files amongst
researchers was slowly adopted by a wider clientele and after 1982 the network started expanding
faster like the big bang.
The credit remains with the National Science Foundation (NSF), USA, whose network of
strategically located supercomputers (NSFnet) allowed people to share information from home
or their institutions. The other networks which developed in parallel, like BITNET of IBM, X.25
based in Europe and UUCP based in Bell Labs got slowly absorbed or got connected to Internet,
in order to provide a unified information sharing medium. The network although started in US,
slowly started reaching other countries by connecting the networks of other countries.
Internet in India started on an auspicious day, 15th of August, 1995. This in a way marks the
beginning of free information flow from every nook and corner of the world and thus could
well be called an “Independence day” for Information Age in the country.

Did u know? What is GIAS?
Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) started a service called GIAS (Gateway Internet
Access Service) to allow the Indian users a bite of the Internet.

1.1.1 Internet Usages

The Internet is an important tool for practically everybody. The applications are endless limited
only by our imagination. Whatever information is required, it is either already available on the
Internet or it is soon going to be available. Here are some interesting application areas:
 Electronic mail, which was until recently considered only an internal mechanism of an
enterprise, is quickly becoming the most widely used application on the Internet. The
most common of the communication methods used by people on the Internet is the private
letter, written by one individual to another (on any subject and in any language), and sent
between any two connected Internet sites or through an Internet E-Mail gateway to or
from a service which provides an Internet gateway.
 The ability to exchange visual information in readable and reusable formats — such as
charts, figures, tables, images, databases, software code — opens up possibilities for
collaboration at the global as well as local levels. With the trend specialization, the ability
not only to communicate but also to actually work with colleagues in the same field
scattered all over the world makes long distance collaboration feasible.
 The resources for on-line research are multiplying at an astounding rate. Searchable databases
library holdings, alerting services, pre-prints, and other information systems are all changing

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