Internet History

The things you learn while surfing the Internet. I got interested today about the Internet. I was wondering what the very first website was. I never found out. Bummer. What I did learn from a site titled History of the Internet and WWW is that one of the earliest milestones in the Information Age occurred in....oh, go ahead and guess what year.



I guessed 1960ish because I was thinking Internet milestones, not Information Age milestones, but what I learned still fascinated me. One of the first milestones that kicked off the Information Age, which is a pre-history of the Internet, was The Atlantic Cable of 1858.



1858! As it turned out that cable was basically a failure, but it spawned numerous more cables to be spread across the ocean floor, thus information was traveling through cable and this is how it worked for about 100 years. Wow.



Then came the launch of Sputnik in 1957, which kicked off satellite technology, viable computer technology, and everything started to snowball from there.



So by this time communications and computer technology were areas being explored and built upon. During the 1960's Packet-switching networks developed and I have no clue what the heck that means, but it led to the birth of the Internet in 1969, as ARPANET. E-mail was invented in 1971, and I'm sure SPAM followed shortly thereafter. Throughout the 1970's the tools of the Internet advanced and grew and in 1982 the TCP/IP became standard protocol, and new stuff kept getting invented and perfected.



1986 brought to the forefront the great possibilities that the Internet could bring about, and the late 80's- early 90's saw the commercialisation of that. It was 1994, when along came the WWW that real commercialisation took off and BAM! Newsgroups, Websites, Browser Wars, Microsoft, Email...possibilities seem endless sometimes. Don't they?



So that is our lesson for today class.



Anybody know what the very first website was?



Forgive me Christopher, but it is just too appropriate right now to say "Class Dismissed"!