The Internet of Things

15Conclusion

John Davies¹, and Carolina Fortuna²

¹British Telecommunications Plc, Ipswich, Suffolk, UK

²Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

15.1 Origins and Evolution

The Internet was made possible by the invention of the packet switching approach to network communications. Based on seminal work at the UK National Physical Laboratory, the central idea was to create a more resilient network [1] and this led to the development of Arpanet [2] and still forms the core technology of today's Internet. The following decades have seen a number of stages of Internet evolution.

Perhaps the first “killer app” on the Internet was email, which was followed by other applications such as Usenet discussion groups (a forerunner of today's web‐based blogs and discussion forums) and Gopher, an application for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet.

The emergence of WorldWideWeb browsers and servers meant that Gopher failed to achieve significant usage and the Web quickly became the dominant application running over the Internet. In its early years, the Web was primarily an application where information was published by one user and could then be accessed and read by many others in a principally one‐to‐many model. More recently, the emergence of so‐called Web 2.0 saw a much more participative model where users collaborate to create web content in a many‐to‐many paradigm. Wikipedia is a prime example of “crowd‐sourced” content and social media systems like Facebook ...