On September 2, 1969, through the U.S. military-industrial complex, a project was launched by universities. The aim was to enable simultaneous information exchange by connecting multiple computers through a cable. Initially, students from the University of California, Stephen Crocker and Vinton Cerf, connected computers using a 4–5 meter-long cable.
For the first time, data transfer between computers took place, and the project proved to be highly successful. The network, initially formed by the connection of four universities, became known as ARPANET, and soon after, computers across the United States began connecting to it.
In 1972, a program enabling the sending of electronic mail via ARPANET was created. The @ symbol was used in email addresses for the first time, and in 1980 it was officially recognized as an international standard. Between 1973 and 1974, the TCP/IP protocol emerged, proposed by ARPANET’s leading contributors Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf. TCP/IP consists of two communication protocols.
In January 1969, the U.S. government laid the foundation for the creation of the internet. As the network expanded, a key question arose: How could people simultaneously access the large number of documents stored on computers through this network? The solution to this challenge led to the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989–1990. Tim Berners-Lee developed the technology of hypertext documents.
In 2004, Tim Berners-Lee was awarded €1,000,000 by an international foundation in recognition of his discovery 15 years earlier. The globalization of the internet dates back to 1988–1989, when Canada, France, and Germany joined the network, followed by the United Kingdom and Latvia in 1992 via NSFNET.
Thus, what began as ARPANET—a simple computer network uniting scientific and educational institutions—quickly gained popularity. It became the foundation of today’s internet.
AzEns.az/ Jalya Orujeva