The history of the internet: when, how and who built it

Today study, banking, shopping, conversation and entertainment are all tied to the internet. Yet the internet we can hardly go a day without began only a few decades ago, with two letters sent between two computers. Here is the history of the internet in simple words.

The internet's big milestones

The first message: "LO"

In the 1960s ARPA, an agency of the US Defense Department, built a network called "ARPANET" to link computers together. On 29 October 1969 an attempt was made to send the word "LOGIN" from UCLA in Los Angeles to a computer at Stanford. But just after the "L" and the "O" went through, the system crashed. So the internet's first message became — "LO"! In its memory, 29 October is observed as "International Internet Day".

TCP/IP: the internet's shared language

At first, different networks could not talk to each other. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn created rules (protocols) called "TCP/IP", which let any network connect to any other. Under them, data is broken into small "packets" that travel by different routes and are put back together at the destination. That is why the two are called "the fathers of the internet".

Did you know? Ray Tomlinson, who sent the first network email in 1971, was also the one who chose the "@" sign for email addresses, to separate the user's name from the computer's name. Today that same sign marks every email address.

The internet and the web: two different things

Many people think the internet and the "World Wide Web" are the same, but they are different. The internet is the vast mesh connecting computers and networks around the world — wires, cables, towers and rules. The web is a service that runs on that mesh, made of websites and links. In 1989, at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web and created HTML, URLs and HTTP. Email, video calls and online games also run on the internet, but not necessarily on the web. Almost all the world's international data travels through cables laid under the sea.

The internet in India

On 15 August 1995 the government company VSNL started internet service for the public in India. Dial-up connections then were very slow and expensive. After 2016 cheap mobile data took the internet to villages, and according to TRAI there were about 950 million internet connections in the country by 2024. Services such as Aadhaar, UPI and DigiLocker were built on this foundation — read Interesting facts about Digital India. The story of the computer: The history of the computer.

How to stay safe online

• Keep a separate, strong password for each account and switch on two-factor authentication (2FA).
• Do not click unknown links or messages that tempt you with prizes or jobs.
• Never tell anyone your OTP, password or bank details — banks never ask for them.
• If you are hit by cyber fraud, call the helpline 1930 at once or complain at cybercrime.gov.in.

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