Beginnings: ARPANET and the Cold War
In the 1960s, at the request of the United States Department of Defense, the agency ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) began work on a computer network. In 1962, Paul Baran proposed the concept of distributed networks rather than star-shaped ones, which was crucial for their resilience. The first nodes of the ARPANET network were created in 1969, connecting four universities in the United States.
A key innovation was packet switching — a method of dividing data into smaller pieces, transmitting them independently, and then reassembling them at the recipient’s end. Thanks to this approach, even if one of the nodes was destroyed, the information could still reach its destination through another route.
TCP/IP and the Birth of the Name “Internet”
In the 1970s and 1980s, the network began to grow, but computers from different manufacturers had difficulty communicating with each other. The solution was the TCP/IP protocol (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), implemented in ARPANET in 1983. This protocol made it possible to connect different networks into a single “network of networks,” which technically created the Internet as we know it today. In 1980, for security reasons, the military part of the network was separated from the civilian and scientific part, which paradoxically accelerated the development of the civilian internet.