Back in the early 60's the department of defence's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARP) began laying down the foundations of making a national network that would link several super computers through out the United States of America. By 1965 ARPA began work on the ARPAnet and by 1969 the first four hosts were connected. They were the Stanford Research Institute, UCLA. UC Santa Barbra and the University of Utah.
From 1970-73 the ARPAnet had 30 computers connected around the country with universities and military scientists sharing data and remote computers and networks. Email soon became the most popular service available on the ARPAnet, Ray Tomlinson developed the first email program in 1971, and from that early time email has now become one of the most widely used methods of communication today. In 1972 the Internetworking group came into being, with Vinton Cerf as the chairman, and also named "The Father of the Internet". In 1973 the Internet became international as the first European servers came online with one in the University College in London and also in the Royal Radar establishment in Norway.
In the years 1974-81 the public had their first look at the Internet as a commercial version of the Internet came online. In 1979 two grad students from the university of North Carolina established the first Usenet newsgroups. Users could login from all over the world and take part in discussions on any topic you could think of.
In 1983 TCP/IP became the common language of the Internet, the ARPAnet also becomes known as the Internet as it begins to move away from its military past and a little more towards becoming an international network. The actual growth of the Internet shows a dramatic increase as well, with the amount of Internet hosts in 1984 is around 1,000 but by 1987 it is over 10,000. 1988 was the year that the Internet came under attack. The "Internet Worm" on November 1st managed to disable 6,000 Internet hosts. Because of this the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is formed to address the problems raised by the worm.
In 1989 system administrator Clifford Stoll who worked at one of the computer centres in Berkley lab released a book "The Cuckoo's Egg", detailing how he caught a group of teenage cyber spies selling hacking into his system and then hacking into military networks and collecting data so it could be sold to the KGB. In the same year the number of Internet hosts exceeds 100,000.
In 1990 the ARPAnet is decommissioned, a victim of its own success. It leaves behind an international network of networks called the Internet, the number of Internet hosts is now well over 300,00.
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