WEB101 Week 2: Reflection

This week we were talking about "What is the Internet?" The Internet is not just the world wide web or email... these are things that need the internet to work. Learning about routers and packets and how the internet has evolved overtime, I was interested to find out that the 1st known form of the internet was way back in 1957 when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball. (Garber, 2007) In the race of world domination between the Russians and the Americans, the public feared that the Soviets' ability to launch satellites also translated into the capability to launch ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear weapons from Europe to the U.S. (Garber, 2007) But from this monumental occasion came the beginning of something that would change how the people of the world would live their lives in the future.

The first ever network of computers was established in 1969 by ARPANET. BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to Leonard Kleinrock's Network Measurements Center at UCLA. The IMP was built from a Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory, designed to handle the ARPANET network interface.

I was also interested to find out when the 1st ever email was sent. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson invented the '@' address for emails and an email was sent from BBNA and BBNB computers (see image below).

The first ever email from BBNA and BBNB in 1971 (source http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/ka10.html)

Apart from all this history about the internet, we reflected on our first personal experiences of the internet. After reading through a few fellow students reflections, you can see how peoples experience vary depending on their age, interest and location of where they first experienced the internet. It makes me wonder how my daughters first experience of the internet would be like and how it will vastly vary from what mine was in the 1990s.

We also had to visit http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/ where you can trace the routing of your internet service provider and where each website you access actually lives in the world. Have a try of it and you would be interested to know where some of the websites you access actually live.

Learning a bit about the infrastructure of how the internet works and how it has developed over the years has given me a greater appreciation for it.

References

http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/
ARPANET - The First Internet http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_arpanet.htm
http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/ka10.html