Richard Vanderhurst

The Internet is the best example of sustained investment and commitment to research and development of the information infrastructure. It began in 1972 with the first demonstrations of ARPANET and several other connected mainframe computers. It revolutionized the computer and the communications world. With the invention of the telegraph, telephone and the radio, the computer set the stage for the technology we use today, the Internet.

It all started with a number of packet-switched networking solutions that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s, this included the ARPANET. The inter-network formed into the idea of a global inter-network that would one day be called 'The Internet".

It began to spread quickly across the advanced telecommunication networks of the United States and then it slowly began to penetrate the rest of the world as it became the international standard and global network.

The Internet is a world-wide broadcasting mechanism for information dissemination and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers. After the introduction of privately run Internet Service Providers in the early 1980s and 1990s, the Internet has had a dramatic impact on culture and commerce. This technological achievement brought us the ability to communicate almost instantaneously through what we refer to day as the "e-mail". The creations of these new innovations also lead to the inflation and collapse of the Dot-com bubble, and a major market collapse. Even through the aches and pains it suffered, the Internet continues to grow.

The Internet Timeline

• Shopping malls and banks arrive on the Internet. You could now order pizza from Pizza Hut in the USA.

• Traditional online dial-up systems Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy began to provide Internet access.
• Netscape becomes the browser of choice.

• 19.5 Million Hosts, 1 Million WWW sites, 71,618 Newsgroups.

2009

• Google will not disclose exactly how many pages it indexes, but it is apparently over 8 billion

Search Engines

The first Web search engine was WebCrawler in 1994. It took till the late late 1990s, before Web directories and Web search engines were popular Yahoo!, founded 1995 and Altavista founded 1995 were the industry leaders.

Google came around in 1998 but really broke through in August 2001 after they had developed new approaches to relevancy ranking with directory features, that are still common. Google's PageRank method for delivering the results has received the most press. As of 2006, search engine rankings are more important than ever, so much so that an industry developed called search engine optimizers, or "SEO") to help web-developers improve their search ranking. 

Richard Vanderhurst.com

Richard Vanderhurst.net

HISTORY OF THE TELEGRAPH

1837 - Charles Wheatstone patents "electric telegraph"

1844 - Samuel Morse demonstrates "Morse code".

1845 - General Oceanic telegraph Co. registered in NYC to link Europe and North America.

1849 - England to France telegraph cable goes into service.
1850 - Morse patents "clicking" telegraph.
1851 - England-France commercial telegraph service begins.
1858 - August 18 - First transatlantic telegraph messages via wire.

1861 - First USA transcontinental telegraph cable begins service.
1868 - First commercially successful transatlantic telegraph cable completed between UK and Canada, with land extension to USA.
1874 - Baudot invents a practical Time Division Multiplexing scheme or telegraph.

1875 - Typewriter invented.
1880 - Oliver Heaviside's analysis shows that a uniform addition of inductance into a cable would produce distortionless transmission.
1901 - Donald Murray links typewriter to high-speed multiplex system, later used by Western Union. The beginnings of Teletype

HISTORY OF THE RADIO TELEPHONE

1920s- Catalina Island telephone service to mainland via radio system.

1921 - British "Marconi Co." offers 3 MHz calls between England and Norway.

1923 - Amateur radio proves that high frequency radio can reach long distances.

1927 - first commercial transatlantic radio telephone service begins.
1929 - HF radio begins commercial transatlantic service.

1930 - HF radio service begins to Buenos Aires.
1931 - Dixon/Point Reyes, California radio begins transpacific service.
1932 - Florida sites begin Caribbean & Central American service.
1937 - USA can call 68 countries via HF radio -- 93% of the world's telephones are interconnected via wires & radio waves.

1876 - Bell patents telephone.

1877 - Bell attempts to use telephone over the Atlantic telegraph cable and fails.

1883 - Test calls placed over five miles of under-water cable.

1884 - San Francisco-Oakland gutta-percha cable begins telephone service.

1910 - Chesapeake Bay cable is first to use coils.

1915 - USA transcontinental telephone service begins (NY-San Francisco).
1921 - Key West-Havana cable begins service.
1928 - Design of a continuously-loaded Newfoundland-Ireland cable begins,
as a joint AT&T-British Post Office project.

1947 - Polyethylene replaces rubber & gutta-percha as preferred insulator.
1949 - "SB" submarine cable developed by AT&T.

1950 - Repeatered SB submarine cable used on Key West-Havana route.
1952 - AT&T-BPO begins transatlantic cable project.

1953 - Canada joins in project, along with Eastern Telephone & Telegraph Co. (AT&T's subsidiary in Canada).

1955 - June 28, HMTS "Monarch" leaves Clarenville, Newfoundland laying cable.

1956 - June 4, "Monarch" leaves Oban to lay the other cable.

Sept. 25, 1956 at 11 am EST, Chairman Craig of AT&T calls Dr. Charles Hill,
1963 - First cable from New Jersey to England.
1965 - First cable from New Jersey to France.