15 Essay Topics on the Internet History

Today, we’re writing about the history of the Internet. This is a three-part guide that will assist you in writing an excellent and highly proficient essay. In this guide, you’ll find some very interesting and informative facts on Internet’s history. The other two guides are briefly explained at the bottom of this page.

Here are 20 facts on the Internet’s history to help you write a proficient essay:

1. The term Internet was first coined by the US Department of Defense to ease internal communications. California became the birthplace of the first ever Internet communications to take place.
2. The term World Wide Web came into existence in 1989 rather late after the first ever electronic computing devices. And the company that conceived it was NEXT, created by Steve Jobs.
3. The first ever message to be sent using Internet communications or protocols was LO. This happened in Stanford as a user tried to type in LOGIN. The user’s name was Charley Kline, who at the time was a student at UCLA. After entering the first “L” and “O”, the system crashed, though about an hour later the system was recovered and the first message ever on the Internet was sent.
4. The protocols for Internet were developed by ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network), a company which worked on early packet switching networks in 1970s which made it possible to join multiple networks.
5. File sharing on the Internet was made possible in 1989 at McGill University due to an accident that closed their FTP server. Before that, sharing was only possible in point-to-point communications. It wasn’t available for a wide area network.
6. Commercial ISPs (Internet service providers) emerged in the 1980s where the common man could now enjoy the advantages of being online. For the first time, the Internet was provided by the US government in some of the states. In 1995, the remaining restrictions were removed and the Internet was made widely available to the public.
7. “Internet” is short for Internet Transmission Control. The term was somewhat abbreviated in 1974. In 1982, the name Internet was made official.
8.  The term “surfing” came about in 1992 in New York by a lady who was new to the Internet.
9.  According to various scientific schools of thought, telegraph machines are said to be the inspiration behind the Internet. But largely, it is accredited to a man named Leonard Kleinrock who wrote a paper called “Information Flow in Large Communication Nets”.
10.  The Internet time is being maintained or tracked by a digital clock that was created in Colorado, which is so accurate that it will reportedly not make an error in 20 million years. This clock is responsible for maintaining Internet time.
11.  Electronic emails came into being in 1972, and were ‘invented’ by Ray Tomlinson, a scientist from the University of Cambridge. This sophisticated invention introduced the difference between sender and receiver and could identify email addresses. Queen Elizabeth sent her first email in 1976, the first ever state leader to use the Internet for communication purposes.
12. Around 3.2 billion people browse the web (worldwide), with Asians making the largest chunk totaling 1.7 billion users, which makes it around 45% of the total population. The Internet has also reached third world countries, and around 30% of the population in third world countries has Internet access. However, a good Internet connection is yet to reach many areas. The Internet is growing faster than the population, with the population change rate standing around 1.13%, and the Internet users are increasing at around 7%, with the user base expected to hit 4 billion in the next four years.
13. Internet addiction is considered a disease in some parts of the world, including China where there are special treatment camps for Internet users. According to Tao Ran, China’s first Internet addiction treatment clinic’s director, around 40% of ‘patients’ suffer from hyperactivity due to the constant use of the Internet.
14. In the year 1965, Mr. Donald Davies suggested a proposal of national data network which was based entirely on packet-switching. Althought his proposal of doing so wasn’t recognized nationally, Mr. Donald went on and made the Mark I packet-switched network in 1970. Mark I worked under real-life operational conditions and moreover fulfilled the needs of a multidisciplinary laboratory. In the later years, 1976 to be specific, the system became even more operational as around 75 terminal devices and 12 computers were connected, as the years progressed more were added until 1986 when it was replaced. ARPANET was the one it got replaced with and if we look at the history of the Internet we’d find that NPL and ARPANET were the first two networks that effectively and practically used packet switching.
15. If we are to look at the history of the Internet, the French advanced just as quickly as the Americans did in packet switching. CYCLADES was the very first packet switching network which was designed and implemented by Louis Pouzin. It was seen in action in 1973, and was originally to be introduced to provide alternative options to the ARPANET design, which was still in its adolescence. CYCLADES was going to be a general system to support network research on a wider and a more multidirectional way. It was a complex and intricate system that was able to create a feedback system where the host was responsible for the data transfer. Before the introduction of CYCLADES, the network was responsible to do so, however due to CYCLADES’ end-to-end protocol system it was a better option to do so.

These were 11 interesting facts on the Internet’s history through which you can extract some good material for your essay. The next part of this guide is 20 topics on Internet history for a proficient custom essay, and in the third part, titled, how to write a history essay on the Internet, we’ll have tips on how to create a similar essay.

We wish you all the best for your research work.

References:
Peters, J. (2016). The idealist : Aaron Swartz and the rise of free culture on the Internet. New York: Scribner.
Powers, S. & Jablonski, M. (2015). The real cyber war : the political economy of Internet freedom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Ryan, J. (2010). A history of the Internet and the digital future. London, England: Reaktion Books.
Dechow, D., Struppa, D. & Nelson, T. (2015). Intertwingled : the work and influence of Ted Nelson. Cham: Springer.
Gillies, J. & Cailliau, R. (2000). How the Web was born : the story of the World Wide Web. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Birman, K. (2005). Reliable distributed systems : technologies, Web services, and applications. New York: Springer.
Mueller, M. (2010). Networks and states the global politics of Internet governance. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.