Looking back on revolutionary technical developments in 1969, landing on the moon overshadowed all other events 50 years ago. It falls in the fall of 1969, the birthday of the Internet. The first internet connection was made in the USA on the evening of October 29th. If you look at the economic and political impact of the Internet, they should have been even greater than the victory of the Americans in the race to the moon.
The start of the Internet started with a crash. Computer science student Charles S. Kline attempted to send a message from a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to a computer more than 500 kilometers away at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Actually Kline wanted to transfer the word "LOGIN". But after only two letters the system crashed. Only one hour later, the complete message could be transmitted.
Until then, only computers of the same type could communicate with each other. "50 years ago, computers with different operating systems were able to exchange information for the first time," says Prof. Christoph Meinel, Scientific Director at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, citing the historical significance. "Therefore, October 29, 1969 is considered the birthday of the Internet."
In 1971, the network consisted of 15 computers
While the moon landing was followed live on TV by several hundred million people, hardly anyone got the historic act at UCLA. Even the scientists involved were unaware of the implications. "We knew we were developing a key new technology that we expected would be of benefit to some of the population, but we had no idea how significant the event was," said Kline's boss, Leonard Kleinrock , later.
The assessment of that time is understandable, after all, it took decades before the Internet penetrated into people's everyday lives. When users were first able to send e-mail messages in 1971, the network called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) had only 15 nodes. Two years later, the first connections to computers outside the US were established with computers in Oslo and London.
Data packets travel separately
But even then, it took another ten years before an important milestone in the history of the Internet was reached, which improved the quality of the data connections: in 1983, the so-called TCP / IP protocol was introduced, with which, in principle, data is still transmitted today.
photo gallery
26 pictures
Photo gallery: WWW History - Historic SitesIn this method, the messages are first divided into small packets, then transmitted independently in the network and reassembled at the receiver. The fundamental development work on this technology had been done by US scientists Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf.
Promoted by the military, overwhelmed by the modern age
In the design of the network also demands of the military played a role. The US Department of Defense wanted a network that can withstand large-scale attacks after enemy attacks. However, Prof. Meinel of the HPI believes that the military aspect in the development of the Internet is overestimated.
Although the development was located in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was under the US Department of Defense. "DARPA was, above all, the body within the state administration that was able to financially support things in an unbureaucratic way if they seemed important enough." DARPA has let many scientists work on innovative project ideas, and the universities have gratefully accepted this money for their research funding. "
The fact that the scientists rather than the military defined the characteristics of the Internet, can also be seen from a serious shortcoming, which plagues it to this day. It has virtually no built-in security features. "Actually, there is a requirement that everyone trusts everyone on the net," said Grant Blank of the British Oxford Internet Institute of New Scientist magazine. This birth defect facilitates crime and espionage, but also disinformation campaigns and hate speech on the Internet.
The Web is a European invention
Until the beginning of the 1990s, the main impulses for Internet development came mainly from the USA. But the Internet's first "killer application," the World Wide Web (WWW), was invented in Europe. In 1991, the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee pushed ahead with concepts at the European Research Center Cern in order to exchange data transnationally and easily.
"The first versions of the WWW were still to operate with complicated commands," recalls Meinel. That changed in 1994, when the first web browser with a graphical interface appeared, Mosaic. From this point on, a mouse click was enough to ensure that the necessary commands were started in the background in the correct order.
The browser technology made companies such as Google and Facebook rise to mega-corporations. The trend intensified with the mobile Internet. With the iPhone (2007) showed that every person can use the Internet, the technology took a back seat. This is linked to another trend: "In the meantime, the computers are disappearing more and more from our field of vision, they are operated in the cloud and can be used over the Internet," says Prof. Meinel.
Cloud technology, dominated by US companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google, also raises issues of privacy and national sovereignty for the HPI director. "I think the state would have the duty to set up its own cloud infrastructure for all its offers alone," he says. The fact that Germany is doing so badly in this area is also due to the fact that the framework conditions for the different applications are not well understood and clearly regulated.
"For example, Bodycam videos of patrol officers are stored on cloud computers from Amazon - you have to let that melt on your tongue, the German state is big enough to build its own infrastructure for all its purposes," says Meinel.
This infrastructure could then be opened to other users and applications outside the administration. "In this way, we could also create larger data pools in Germany or Europe - these data pools are needed if you want to develop and train applications in the field of artificial intelligence and keep up with international developments in the field of AI."
Milestones in the history of the Internet
October 29, 1969
The student Charles S. Kline transmits a message from a computer of the UCLA in Los Angeles to a computer about 500 kilometers distant at the Stanford Research Institut.
December 1969
The University is also involved in the University of California (Santa Barbara) and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
October 1971
First e-mails can be sent and received in the ARPANET.
Summer 1973
Scientists Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn are developing the technical Internet protocol TCP / IP on behalf of the US Department of Defense. This also allowed connections to be made via satellites and mobile networks. The protocol is published in 1974.
January 1, 1983
The technical basis for the until today valid fourth version of the Internet Protocol IPv4 comes into force. Thus, the name "Internet" prevails.
1984
With the Domain Name System (DNS), it is possible to address computers around the world with people-friendly names. Before you had to specify IP addresses such as 203.0.113.232.
August 1984
At the Computer Science Faculty of the University of Karlsruhe, the first German node is connected to the computer network CSNet, which made it possible for the first time to communicate with other Internet nodes.
March 12, 1989
The British physicist Tim Berners-Lee presents the idea of the WWW (World Wide Web) at the European Research Center Cern.
November 13, 1990
Berners-Lee sets up the first web server, info.cern.ch, on his NeXT computer.
November 11, 1993
The first Windows version of the graphical web browser Mosaic appears. From this, the Netscape browser evolves.
1996
Internet users in China need to register. Later, the People's Republic secluded itself from the free Internet with a "Great Firewall of China".
September 15, 1997
Google goes online in the US.
1998
It is gaining the realization that the four billion available IPv4 addresses could eventually become scarce. The successor standard IPv6 offers an address space of 340 sextillion numbers.
1999
The US online service AOL lets tennis star Boris Becker marvel at the easy access to the Internet ("Am I already in it?"). The spots are gaining cult status and driving the use of the Internet in Germany.
June 1, 1999
Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker found the music exchange service Napster. The service paved the way for legal online music services such as iTunes and Spotify.
March 2000
On the stock markets, the speculative bubble is bursting with so-called dot-com companies, which acted with questionable business models based on the booming internet.
4 February 2004
Mark Zuckerberg founds Facebook. 15 years later, the service has 2.4 billion users.
January 9, 2007
Steve Jobs presents the first iPhone that has made the mobile Internet breakthrough.
2004
For the first time, more than half of the people in developed countries are online (source UN-Telecommunication Union ITU).
2nd of september 2008
Google releases the first Chrome browser, which soon displaces other web programs such as Firefox or Microsoft's Internet Explorer from the market.
January 2009
The WhatsApp instant messaging service goes online and triggers the classic SMS for many people. On February 19, 2014 Facebook takes over the service.
2018
81 percent of the people in industrialized countries are on the Internet. In developing countries, the rate is 41 percent (source ITU).
June 2019
In Germany, frequencies for the super-fast 5G data radio will be auctioned for 6.55 billion euros, which will, among other things, boost industrial networking.
