The Internet began as an academic research project in 1969, but its official birthday is considered January 1, 1983. On this day Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and the Defense Data Network officially changed to the TCP/IP standard. By 1987, there were nearly 30,000 hosts on the Internet. In 1989 the proposal for the World Wide Web was written by Tim Berners-Lee. In 1990 the first commercial dial-up Internet service provider enabled Internet connection for home users. In 1991, the first web page was created.
That was the year when I got my first PC (Intel 286 CPU) as a CS student, but it didn’t have any network interface. It’s hard to imagine today, but this PC was completely offline. If I wanted to transfer data from/to this PC, I had to use floppy disks. Few years later I got my first dial-up modem. It needed a phone line to connect and the bandwidth was rather low, but it marked the beginning of the Internet era.
The Internet has revolutionized communications and methods of commerce by allowing various computer networks around the world to interconnect. It quickly became popular and grew at a rapid pace. By 2020, approximately 4.5 billion people, or more than half of the world’s population, were estimated to have access to the Internet. Our world today relies on the Internet, which supports human communication, as well as machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. It supports access to digital information by many applications, including the World Wide Web (WWW). Without it, many businesses and essential systems would fail. It is obviously one of the fundamental enablers of cloud computing. When we access the cloud, we connect to remote services over the Internet. Also within the cloud, nodes communicate over the network. Therefore, it is important to understand how the network is structured and the communication protocols that are used.