This is the fire topic I know you've been waiting for, I'll give it to you in a moment. You can't talk about Bitcoin and not talk about the internet. In lame man language, Bitcoin is see to be the internet money. I mean, you can do almost anything on the internet already yes? The only thing I can't wait to see being developed on the internet is to browse foods and have it come out a place like how you have printer machines, bringing out paper files from them. I know it's very possible and who knows, maybe I'll be the one to make it happen haha. We can go on and on about different things being done on the internet today, but I'd like to give you a little history, just so you understand how this big gigantic web of information came about. So, without further ado, let's dive right in.

THE ORIGINS OF THE INTERNET

The origins of the internet are rooted in the USA of the 1950s. The Cold War was at its height and huge tensions existed between North America and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers were in possession of deadly nuclear weapons, and people lived in fear of long-range surprise attacks. The US realised it needed a communications system that could not be affected by a Soviet nuclear attack. Emerging from research initiatives like ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense project. The internet of things started. The goal was to create a decentralized communication network that could withstand potential nuclear attacks.

The development of key protocols, including TCP(Transmission Controlled Protocol) / IP(Internet Protocol) became the foundation for modern internet communication. These protocols established standardized rules for data transmission, ensuring compatibility across diverse systems.

The invention of the WWW by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 introduced a user-friendly interface, enabling the creation and navigation of interconnected web pages. This breakthrough democratized access to information and set the stage for the internet's exponential growth.

In the early 1980s, cheaper technology and the appearance of desktop computers allowed the rapid development of local area networks (LANs). An increase in the amount of computers on the network made it difficult to keep track of all the different IP addresses.

This problem was solved by the introduction of the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983. DNS was invented by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel at the University of Southern California. It was one of the innovations that paved the way for the World Wide Web.

Now I'm sure the most pressing question on your mind would be, how is everything connected? Or how is possible to reach people everywhere without any physic connections? It's actually in three ways;

Backbone and Servers:

The internet relies on a vast network of physical infrastructure, including fiber-optic cables, satellites, and data centers. Undersea cables connect continents, forming the backbone that facilitates global communication.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs):

ISPs play a crucial role in providing access to the internet. They connect users to the broader network and manage the flow of data between devices and the web.

Cloud Computing:

The advent of cloud computing has transformed internet infrastructure, allowing users to access computing resources remotely. This shift has implications for scalability, flexibility, and the distribution of computational power.

Now that you know that, let's get into the very first things that made it unto the internet.

THE BEGINNINGS OF EMAIL

Email was a rapid—but unintended—consequence of the growth of ARPANET. As the network increased in popularity and scope, users quickly realised the potential of the network as a tool for sending messages between different ARPANET computers.

Ray Tomlinson, an American computer programmer, is responsible for electronic mail as we know it today. He introduced the idea that the destination of a message should be indicated using the @ symbol, which was first used to distinguish between the individual user’s name and that of their computer (i.e. user@computer). When DNS was introduced, this was extended to user@host.domain.

Early email users sent personal messages and began mailing lists on specific topics. One of the first big mailing lists was ‘SF-LOVERS’ for science fiction fans.

The development of email showed how the network had transformed. Rather than a way of accessing expensive computing power, it had started to become a place to communicate, gossip and make friends.

Just to add an extra information and some clarity, especially in the WWW area. The terms ‘World Wide Web’ and ‘internet’ are often confused. The internet is the networking infrastructure that connects devices together, while the World Wide Web is a way of accessing information through the medium of the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of a ‘web of information’ in 1989. It relied on ‘hyperlinks’ to connect documents together. Written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a hyperlink can point to any other HTML page or file that sits on top of the internet.

We're close to where I want us to pay close attention to and that's the scaling of the businesses on the internet and how well it was received by everyone. Before we get into that, let's quickly look at something that preceded that, -Web browsers and how astronomical the growth was as a result of it.

THE INTRODUCTION OF WEB BROWSERS

Tim Berners-Lee was the first to create a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. He called this ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’. However, this original application had limited use as it could only be used on advanced NeXt machine. A simplified version that could run on any computer was created by Nicola Pellow, a maths student who worked alongside Berners-Lee at CERN.

In 1993, Marc Andreessen, an American student in Illinois, launched a new browser called Mosaic. Created at the National Center for Super-computing Applications (NCSA), Mosaic was easy to download and install, worked on many different computers and provided simple point-and-click access to the World Wide Web. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images next to text, rather than in a separate window.

Mosaic’s simplicity opened the web up to a new audience, and caused an explosion of activity on the internet, with the number of websites growing from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996.

In 1994 Andreesen formed Netscape Communications with entrepreneur Jim Clark. They led the company to create Netscape Navigator, a widely used internet browser that at the time was faster and more sophisticated than any of the competition. By 1995, Navigator had around 10 million global users.

So here were the first businesses that hopped on the internet and how they fared. This is important because some other businesses didn't think it was important and were left behind. Also known as the dot-com bubble of the 2000s, let's talk about a few of them;

EARLY ECOMMERCE AND THE ‘DOTCOM BUBBLE’

The enormous excitement surrounding the internet led to a massive boom in new technology shares between 1998 and 2000. This became known as the ‘dotcom bubble’.

The claim was that world industry was experiencing a ‘new economic paradigm’, the likes of which had never been experienced before. Investors in the stock market began to believe the hype and threw themselves into a frenzy of activity. The internet was thought to be central to economic growth, while share prices implied that new online companies carried the seeds for expansion. This led in turn to a feverish level of investment and unrealistic expectations about rates of return.

Venture capitalists flourished and many companies were founded on dubious business plans. The most notorious of these was the high fashion online retailer Boo.com, which spent its way through $200 million, only to collapse within six months of its website going live.

However, despite their failure, such businesses helped cause a fundamental transformation and left an important legacy. Many investors lost money, but they also helped to finance the new system and lay the groundwork for future success in e-commerce.

Finally, you made it. Next? Of course, you should know, Bitcoin. As always, your favorite crypto journalist Clever Abaribote.

Sources: https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/short-history-internet#the-origins-of-the-internet

https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/