A brief history of computer networks in one article

Computer networks have come a long way, and all the communication software we use now is undoubtedly made possible by computer networks, but do you know the background to their emergence? We have now eliminated the phenomenon of information silos, but a few years ago, did you know that computer networks could help us connect the world and eliminate information silos? Let's talk about the development of computer networks.

 

The birth of the Internet

The world's first computer was introduced in 1946. At this time there were no computer networks, so computers could only work in isolation, even though two computers were very close together, they had to keep to their own part of the world like an introverted child.

 

After World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union were fighting for supremacy, for military purposes, the United States formed a mysterious department, ARPA. This department, at the request of the US Department of Defense, intended to develop a decentralised command system that would have many nodes, and whenever some of them were destroyed, the others would still be able to communicate with each other, and this project was completed in 1966, and ARPA named it ARPANET (Arpa Network ARPANET was one of the first computer networks, and it was the precursor to the Internet.

 

ARPANET was one of the first computer networks to use packet switching, where data communicated through a packet-switching system was formatted into packets with the address of the destination machine and sent to the next machine on the network to be received.

 

The term packet was coined by Donald Davies in 1965 to describe the data that is transmitted between computers over a network, and packets have a pivotal place in computer networks and are arguably the heroes of the Internet.

 

ARPANET was officially launched in 1969. Also in 1969, Steve Crocker of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) published the first RFC paper, which is considered to be the beginning of the Internet. In the same year, the first network switch made the first data transmission over the ARPANET, which marked the birth of the Internet.

 

We often quote .rfc at the end of an article or talk to someone who comes up with an idea that he doesn't understand, and then you keep asking him about it and he tells you to look up the RFC document yourself (as if it were me), and that's what it says.

 

Officially, an RFC is an official document that describes the methodology, behaviour, research or innovation of the Internet and Internet systems.

 

In layman's terms, it is the official document of the Internet Protocol.

 

The birth of TCP/IP

Although it is now possible for several nodes to communicate with each other, the number of nodes is still relatively small at four. To solve this problem, APPA launched a new research project to interconnect different computer LANs.

 

The early ARPANET used a network protocol called NCP, but as the network evolved, and as multi-node access and user demands on the network increased, the NCP protocol could no longer adequately support the development needs of ARPANET. It can only be used in the same operating system environment, which means that Windows users cannot communicate with MacOS users and Android users.

 

So ARPANET needed a new protocol to replace the NCP protocol, which was no longer adequate, and the task was given to Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf, whose theories are unprecedented today. I'll be brief: they came up with a new transmission control protocol, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). In 1974, these two men published a paper in the IEEE Journal entitled "Network Communication Protocols for Packet Switching", formally introducing TCP/IP as a way to interconnect computer networks.

 

Although we thought the TCP/IP protocol was a great invention, it was not well received in the context of the time and its four-layer model was relatively rudimentary compared to the seven-layer model proposed by the ISO. However, after four years of continuous improvement, the TCP/IP protocol finally completed its infrastructure. Finally, in 1983, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency decided to phase out the NCP protocol and replace it with the TCP/IP protocol. In 1985, TCP/IP became part of the UNIX operating system. Almost all operating systems have since come to support TCP/IP and the protocol has become mainstream.

 

Further developments

In the early 1980s, ARPANET was a great success, but it was not available to schools that did not have a contract with a US federal agency. To solve this problem, the National Science Foundation (NSF) set out to create a Computer Science Network (CSNet) for university students, a protocol layer added on top of other basic networks, which uses the communication capabilities provided by other networks and is also a separate network from the user's point of view. CSNet is centrally controlled, with all information exchange taking place through a single repeater.

 

The NSF invested in five separate university supercomputer centres in 1986 and formed the NSFNET. As a result of NSF encouragement and funding, many universities, government agencies and even private research institutions incorporated their own local area networks into the NSFNET and from 1986 to 1991 the number of NSFNET subnets grew rapidly from 100 to over 3000.

 

Not only did schools join, but many academic groups, businesses, research institutions and even individuals joined, and Internet users were no longer restricted to purely computer professionals. The new users found inter-computer communication more attractive. As a result, they are increasingly using the Internet as a tool for communication and correspondence, rather than just sharing the computing power of NSF's giant computers.

 

The Internet is a series of global information aggregates consisting of numerous subnetworks, each with a number of computers.

 

By the early 1990s, the Internet had a very large number of subnetworks, each responsible for its own set-up and operating costs, which were interconnected through the NSFNET, which connected tens of millions of computers across the United States and had tens of millions of users, and was the Internet's primary member network. As computer networks expanded and proliferated around the world, networks outside the United States were gradually connected to the NSFNET backbone or its subnets.

 

The year 1993 was an important one in the development of the Internet, with all of its most important technological innovations to date, and the introduction of the WWW - the World Wide Web - and browsers, which gave the Internet a new and exciting platform: not only text, but also pictures, sound and animation, and even movies. The Internet has evolved into a new world of text, images, sound, animation and film, and has swept the world at an unprecedented rate.

 

The rapid rise of the Internet has attracted the attention of the world, and China has also placed great emphasis on building its information infrastructure and connecting to the Internet. At present, the information networks that have been built and are being built are having a profound impact on the development of science and technology, economy and society in China, as well as on the exchange of information with the international community.

 

Internet development in China

Although the Internet in China did not start as early as in the United States, the country has the fastest growth rate of the Internet in the world.

 

The development of the Internet in China began between 1987 and 1993, when scientists in China began to access Internet resources. During this period, a number of research institutes, led by the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, cooperated with foreign institutions to carry out some scientific research projects connected to the Internet, using the Internet's E-mail system through dial-up, and providing international Internet e-mail services to some key institutions and research institutes in China.

 

In October 1990, China officially registered the top-level domain name cn with the International Internet Information Centre, thus opening up Internet e-mail using its own domain name.

 

In January 1994, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) accepted China's request for formal access to the Internet, and in March 1994, China was granted permission to join the Internet, and in early April, at the Joint Commission on Science and Technology Cooperation between China and the United States, we formally requested the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to connect to the Internet on behalf of our government and were granted permission. At this point, China finally broke through the final link, and on 20 April, with the NCFC project to connect to the Internet on a dedicated international line, China came into full contact with the Internet. In May of the same year, our connection was fully completed. Our government acknowledged the entry of the Internet into our country. The domain name of our network was finally determined as cn. This was named by the Chinese press as one of the top ten science and technology news in 1994 and was listed in the National Statistical Bulletin as one of our major scientific and technological achievements in 1994.

 

From 1994 to the present, China achieved a TCP/IP connection to the Internet, thus gradually opening up full-featured Internet services; large computer network projects were officially launched and the Internet entered a period of rapid development in China. In May 1995, preparations were made to build the CHINANET national backbone network, and in January 1996, the CHINANET backbone network was completed and officially opened, and the nationwide public computer interconnection network began to provide services. This marked the rapid development stage of the Internet in China.

 

A number of nationwide public computer networks have been built in China, the largest of which are the following.

 

China Telecom Internet CHINANET

China Unicom Internet UNINET

China Mobile Internet CMNET

China Computer Network for Education and Research CERNET

China Science and Technology Network CSTNET

It can be found that the construction of the Internet in China is divided into three main stages.

 

The first stage was from 1987 to 1993, which was called the initiation stage, or the experimental stage, when China started to contact the Internet and carried out scientific research projects and scientific and technological cooperation work, although the network application at this stage was limited to a small range of e-mail services.

The second stage was from 1994 to 1996, the start-up stage, or the laying stage, when China began to set up and lay the backbone network and access the Internet, and since then China has been officially recognised internationally as a country with Internet access. Then ChinaNet, CERnet, CSTnet and many other Internet network projects were launched one after another nationwide.

The third stage was from 1997 to the present, when the Internet was accessed nationwide, and this was the stage of rapid development of the Internet in China.

After entering the 21st century, the CERNET2 trial network was opened, which connected the three CERNET core nodes in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou at a speed of 2.5 Gbit/s - 10 Gbit/s, marking that China's Internet had entered the international advanced level.

 

CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) publishes the development of China's Internet every year, interested partners can check the relevant information at www.cnnic.cn.

 

Responsibility Editor: Wu Xiaoyan

Source: programmer cxuan