Internet at 40 !!!!!!

Did you know that Internet has completed 40 years in existence?? I would be surprised if you knew that. We may be hooked to social networking sites or used to seeing goofy videos these days but that was not on the minds of Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA when they began experiments, laying the foundation of what later would become Internet.The researchers just wanted to create an open network to share information  and this very openness went onto spur innovation that would later spur the likes of Youtube, Facebook & WWW.

Key milestones in the life on Internet

1969

On Sept. 2, two computers at UCLA exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military computer network. The first connection between two sites – UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. – takes place on Oct. 29, though the network crashes after the first two letters of the word “logon” are transmitted. UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah join the network by the end of the year.

1972

Ray Tomlinson brings email to the network, choosing @ as a way to specify email addresses belonging to other systems

1973

Arpanet gets first international nodes, in England and Norway.

1974

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true internet

1983

Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as ‘.com’, ‘.gov’ and ‘.edu’ comes a year later.

1988

One of the first internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers.

1990

Tim Berners- Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely.

1993

Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page

1994

Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial web browser, Netscape. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services

1999

Napster popularizes music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry.

2000

The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide.

2004

Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook at Harvard University.

2005

Launch of YouTube video-sharing site.

2006

World Internet population surpasses 1 billion.

2007

Apple releases iPhone, introducing millions more to wireless internet access.

2008

Netscape’s developers pull the plug on the pioneer browser, though an offshoot, Firefox, remains strong.

2009

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer becomes the first major daily newspaper to move entirely online. Google announces development of a free computer operating system designed for a user experience that primarily takes place on the Web.

Addicted to the Net

The Internet has hooked billions of people in its web. According to the latest figures, the number of internet users in the world is -1,596,270,108.

The number of internet users is expected to double over the next few years. According to InternetWorldStats (IWS), China tops in the number of Internet users.

China – 298,000,000 users.

US       – 227,190,9893 users.

Japan – 94,000,000 users.

India  – 81,000,000 users.

Brazil – 67,510,400 users.

MID-LIFE CRISIS

While the Internet is more widely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threaten to constrict its growth.A variety of factors are to blame.

• Spam and hacking attacks force network operators to erect security firewalls.
• Authoritarian regimes block access to many sites and services within their borders.
• Commercial considerations spur policies that can thwart rivals, particularly on mobile devices like the iPhone.

Challenges Ahead

• Internet is running out of space or IP address exhaustion.The current IPv4 addresses are likely be run out by 2011. That would mean no more new websites.
• The second big problem is the bandwidth. It is hard to believe that today Youtube needs more bandwidth each day than what was required for all the sites in webspace in 2000.

Back in 2000 we had to face what we called Y2K bug.Everyone raced around to make themselves Y2K compliant before the fast approaching deadline.When the clock ticked Jan 1 2000 no major problems were reported.Similarly to  prevent the shortage of IPv4 addresses from curbing the growth of Internet we need to start working from today. The answer to this crisis is the IPv6 which will provide us with unlimited number of addresses.It will also enable efficient rollout of broadband, Internet-connected mobile phones and sensor networks.Many existing networks would need to be upgraded to accommodate the new protocol to growth further and make better and faster technological advances in a medium that unites the world.