From ARPANET to Firefox and Everything In-Between
We owe a lot to the internet. It's allowed us to connect with people from all over the world (and sometimes in our own houses), we can look up anything and everything we could ever want with the click of a mouse, and we spend hours catching up on our favorite shows and the occasional cat video on YouTube (don't lie, you do it too). Without it, society arguably wouldn't have advanced as far as it has in the past fifty-odd years; we also would never have gotten the iPhone (when Steve Jobs debuted it at MacWorld in 2007, one of the products it was combining was a "breakthrough internet-communications device", so the iPhone literally wouldn't have existed without it). The main point is that the internet is a really big deal, but sometimes we tend to take it for granted and overlook the contributions that brought it to where it is today. The second point is that you literally wouldn't be reading this right now if it weren't for ARPANET.
In the early 1960s, the US Department of Defense had tasked its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)—this was different from DARPA, which was the defense arm and produced the Predator drone and SR-71, among other things—with figuring out a way for the Department's research scientists to access their computer network without having to be in the same geographic location as one of the computers in use at the time (which, some argued, was the whole reason ARPANET was created in the first place—to take away the need for physicality); contrary to popular opinion, it was not so it could be used in the event of a nuclear attack.
Initiated in 1966, ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office head Bob Taylor and his team came up with a solution that used complex engineering, mathematics, and technological know-how (and a little dark magic, if one believed the conspiracies) to enable government officials to access the ARPANET from practically anywhere, as long as the computer they were using was equipped with an Interface Message Processor (what we today would call a router). Three years later in 1969, the first four IMP-connected computers—located at UCLA, the Augmented Research Center at Stanford Research Institute (SRI International today), the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah School of Computing—went online, with the first host-to-host connection made between SRI and UCLA on October 29/30; two years after that, the network was declared fully operational, with widespread email being available by 1973.
ARPANET was originally restricted to government agencies when it was first introduced, but it gained a wider audience ten years later in 1981 when the National Science Foundation funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET) and expanded access to universities. This went on for another five years until 1986, when the National Science Network unveiled its own NSFNET, putting ARPANET on the fast track to obsolescence; ARPANET was officially decommissioned in 1990, nineteen years after it first began and a full twenty-four years after it was originally designed. Among its many contributions to computing were the aforementioned remote login access, file transfer, and email.
Depending on where you stand (and your temperament), email is either the greatest thing ever invented, or the bane of your existence. You either love sending emails because you're an introvert who hates the thought of communicating with people face-to-face, or you're an extrovert who likes talking to people in person rather than slogging through your inbox. No matter how you feel, you can thank ARPANET and Ray Tomlinson (he sent the first email in 1969, but ironically no one knows what he wrote because the message was only a test and thus wasn't important anyway) for giving it to you. While the phrase "electronic mail" has been used since at least 1975 (and its "e-mail" derivative was in the general lexicon since Apocalypse Now and Salem's Lot—1979), Tomlinson's push for the use of @ in email predates even that by a good eight years or so; he first made mention of it in 1971 (interesting tidbit: the first head of state to send an email using ARPANET was Queen Elizabeth II; she did so on March 9, 1976 from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment).
While email can be a good thing—after all, it doesn't require an immediate response so the recipient can read it at their leisure, and global companies can communicate across borders—it can also be detrimental; because email takes away face-to-face interaction, communication can not only be seen as less personal, but people who get stuck reading emails all day often neglect other job- and life-related matters.
Web Browsers
ARPANET may not have directly brought about the modern web browser, but the internet has a funny way of working itself out—you wouldn't be reading this otherwise. After Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the world's first web browser (WorldWideWeb) and web server in 1991, the internet exploded in popularity. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina launched their own browser, Mosaic, in 1993; it became a hit and was titled "the world's firs popular web browser" simply because it was developed with the technology to display images on a web page alongside text. Andreessen left Mosaic soon after and founded Netscape, which launched Navigator in 1994 as an answer to Mosaic.
Ironically, it was this decision that prompted Microsoft to unveil Internet Explorer a year later and kick off the "browser wars"; Microsoft would overtake Netscape and eventually cause the company to go under because of two (arguably) genius moves—first, the company bundled Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system so that users wouldn't need to download anything separately; and second, the browser was marketed as freeware, meaning that the user could download it as many times as they wanted.
It wasn't until the turn of the 21st century that the web browser grew into its modern interpretation. Because websites themselves have gotten more sophisticated and broadband connectivity has increased (meaning more data-intensive content like the multitude of streaming services that currently saturate the market), web browsers have had to expand their HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and multimedia capabilities. Try that with a 56k dial-up modem and it would probably explode.
The internet has come a long way from its humble beginnings in 1966 when it was written on the back of a napkin (probably not, but you never know), but there's no denying that without the technological foresight of Bob Taylor, Ray Tomlinson, Tim Berners-Lee and others, you'd never be able to binge all eight seasons of Game of Thrones in one weekend.
About the Author: Ronald Hamilton, Jr. is a graduate of Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication and Media Studies. When he's not writing for COM-GAP, Ronald is a volunteer with the nonprofit Live Forever Project.