internet

Whether you’re an average teenager wanting to keep in touch with friends after school, or a business person needing a low cost but effective way to keep work related material local and secret, chances are you use E-Mail or Instant Messaging services. For communication purposes in this high tech lifestyle that exists today, these systems are used only with the basic understanding needed to run these devices. You are about to learn how these systems came to be and the in depth understanding needed to make them work.

     To start with, you must know that they require a system of computers connected to a LAN (Local Area Network) server. The most commonly used and largest LAN server in the world is the Internet. Since the internet hosts the majority of all IM (Instant Messaging) and E-Mail servers, then you must know the beginnings of it.

     The Internet’s precursor was the ARPANET. The ARPANET was a large wide-area network created by the United States Defense Advanced Research project Agency (ARPA). Established in 1969 ARPANET served as a test-bed for new networking technologies, linking many universities and research centers. The first two nodes that formed the ARPANET were UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute, followed by the University of Utah. Because of his unique expertise in data networking Len Kleinrock would use the technology which by then had come to be known as “packet switching”.