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A brief
HISTORY
of communications technology
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| "What
hath God Wrought!" In 1844 those words were sent
by Samuel F.B. Morse over his recently invented telegraph.
Moving across a 40-mile link between Baltimore and Washington, the
transmission represented the dawn of electronic communication. |
| On March 10,
1876, Alexander Graham Bell
transmitted the first telephone message. Calling his
assistant, who was in a nearby room, he said, "Mr. Watson, come
here, I ant you." Today, the telephone industry in the U.S.
generates about $200 billion in annual revenues. |
| In 1898,
Guglielmo Marconi made practical use of radio
technology when he followed the Kingstown Regatta in a tugboat and sent
a report to a Dublin newspaper. |
| The British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) gets credit for the
first use of TV with coverage of the procession of the
coronation of King George VI from Hyde Park Corner in 1937. |
| INTERNET |
| Today,
computer-based communication and the Internet represent the ultimate
extension of communications technology |
The Internet was formed in
1968, when the Department of Defense created the Advanced Research Project Agency
(ARPA). Its first global computer network was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network).
In the 1980,s the Department of Defense assigned the ARPA project to the
National Science Foundation (NSF), expanding the range of sites for businesses, universities, and government and military installations.
The World Wide Web
1972.
The Inter-Networking Group becomes the first of several
standards-setting entities to govern the growing network. Vinton
Cerf is elected the first chairman of the INWG, and later
becomes known as the "Father of the Internet".
1982-1987.
Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf are key members of a team that cerates TCP/IP
(Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), the common language of
all Internet computers
1982.
The term "Internet" is used for the first
time.
The World Wide Web was formally proposed in 1989
by Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at the European Laboratory for
Particle Physics in Switzerland. The Web was originally designed as a
research tool to allow seamless access to different computers across the
Internet. Development of the Web concept continued and the first
browser, know as "WWW," was released in 1991. Two years later,
Marc Andreesen, then with the University of Illinois, released the
initial version of the world's first commercial browser, named Mosaic.
The rest, as they say is history. Andreesen went on to become a
co-founder of Netscape, maker of the world's most popular browser,
Netscape Navigator.
1996.
Users in almost 150 countries around the world are now connected to the
Internet. The number of computer hosts approaches 10 million. Within 30
years, the Internet has grown from a Cold War concept for controlling
the tattered remains of a post-nuclear society to the Information
Superhighway |
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According to Lawrence Roberts, who 30 years
ago created ARPANet, an ancestor of the Internet, Internet traffic
quadrupled last year and is still keeping that pace, which is faster than
the stunning 280 percent average annual traffic increase recorded in the
late 1990s. Roberts predicts that Internet traffic will continue to
quadruple for several years. He also expects revenue from carrying data
across the network will exceed voice revenue in two or three years. (Sep.
2001) |
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