The History of the Internet in Byte-Sized Chunks

large technology firms – Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Alphabet (the parent company of Google) – account for 48 per cent of all internet traffic worldwide, according to an analysis by Sandvine, a company that tracks where the bits and bytes go. That proportion is decreasing, by 9 percentage points in 2022, but still shows just how concentrated large parts of our lives and the data that makes them up is in the hands of a small number of companies.

Postel would also be behind the introduction of TLDs, or top level domains, such as .com, .co.uk, .edu and so on, which he conceived of in 1986. When he died in 1998 at the age of fifty-five

The DNS was invented by two researchers at the University of Southern California called Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel, in 1983. It’s a digital equivalent of a phone book and made it easier to keep track of the internet as it grew. That phone book had existed before the arrival of the DNS: in the ARPANET days, those overseeing the network maintained a file called hosts.txt, which contained easily understandable addresses for key points on the network.

It was the first, and being first,
was best, but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.

while the internet became more academic and less military, the armed forces splintered off into their own section of the internet: MILNET (Military Network) assured its users more secure communications away from the prying eyes of the academy.

Queen Elizabeth II sent her first email on 26 March 1976, from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern, England. She used the username HME2 – Her Majesty Elizabeth II

emails might not have been so widely used were it not for the advocacy of Stephen Lukasik, a director at ARPA at the time, who told staff that the most effective way to contact him was to use the nascent tool. People did: Lukasik became swamped by a deluge of email; by 1976, a study conducted by ARPA found that 75 per cent of all the traffic on ARPANET was due to email.

Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA,

. Because before the internet we know today,