DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

A (Very) Brief History of the Internet

In the late 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA (later DARPA), began funding the ARPAnet , an experimental wide area computer network that connected important research organizations in the U.S. The original goal of the ARPAnet was to allow government contractors to share expensive or scarce computing resources. From the beginning, however, users of the ARPAnet also used the network for collaboration. This collaboration ranged from sharing files and software and exchanging electronic mail—now commonplace—to joint development and research using shared remote computers.

The Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocol suite was developed in the early 1980s and quickly became the standard host-networking protocol on the ARPAnet. The inclusion of the protocol suite in the University of California at Berkeley’s popular BSD Unix operating system was instrumental in democratizing internetworking. BSD Unix was virtually free to universities. This meant that internetworking—and ARPAnet connectivity—were suddenly available cheaply to many more organizations than were previously attached to the ARPAnet. Many of the computers being connected to the ARPAnet were being connected to local area networks (LANs), too, and very shortly the other computers on the LANs were communicating via the ARPAnet as well.

The network grew from a handful of hosts to tens of thousands of hosts. The original ARPAnet ...