HISTORY OF THE INTERNET.

By Austin H.

Political Backing

The Cold War

The Cold War was reaching a 'Nuclear Brink', tensions were high between USA and the USSR. The Cold War spurred many new inventions and pushed the technological limits of both counties. In 1957, Russian satellite ‘Sputnik’ was launched causing a panic throughout the USA. It made the U.S. Defense Department consider ways information could be transported around, even after a nuclear attack.

Engineering Difficulty

IMPs

The first ever collection of computers was made by the main universities in the USA, an example being MIT or Caltech. However, as these universities did not collaborate on the creation of these machines, this means that the computers were not programmed to speak to each other, their architecture was not compatible whatsoever. This created the problem where incoming data from another computer over the early version of the internet, between universities, would not be able to understand each other. This was solved by the creation of the IMP, Interface Message Processor. The IMP would receive the data from the network, process it and pass it on to the computer in an architecture it could understand. This also solved the problem of many universities not wanting to give up some of their processing power, if it were to be run on the computer. It would now be completely separate from the computer reducing the strain on the system.