The Internet...

It's Friday once again my dears! It's unbelievable how the days go by so quickly I sometimes lose track of the date lol! I'm pretty sure that most of you also experiences this every so often, right? Especially for busy people like us, the days go by unnoticed. But before we end this week, let's have one last episode for today. Let's learn a little more about one of the greatest breakthroughs in Technology of all time, the internet.

Yep, since the internet is one of the technologies that will play a major role in the creation of the virtual world, let's discover a little more about it. After all, this is something that we all rely upon in our daily lives and as I've mentioned several times in my posts here, the technologies needed in building the virtual already exist and internet is certainly one of them.

Did you know that the there is no single person that can be pointed out as the inventor of the internet? The Internet was the work of dozens of pioneering scientists, programmers and engineers who each developed new features and technologies that eventually merged to become the “information superhighway” we know today.

There was Nikola Tesla who toyed with the idea of a “world wireless system” in the early 1900s, and visionary thinkers like Paul Otlet and Vannevar Bush conceived of mechanized, searchable storage systems of books and media in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the first established idea for the internet was only conceived in the early 1960s when MIT’s J.C.R. Licklider popularized the idea of an “Intergalactic Network” of computers.

Shortly thereafter, computer scientists developed the concept of “packet switching,” a method for effectively transmitting electronic data that would later become one of the major building blocks of the Internet. The first workable prototype of the Internet came in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network.

Oh what a discovery! I never thought that the idea of the internet was conceived long before I was born. I'm pretty sure that you were as surprised as I am with this new information we probably were not thinking about although we are using the internet day in and day out, right?

Well, there's so much more that we need to know about this technology and its role to the coming of age of the virtual world a few decades from now so please stay tuned as I bring you more discoveries about it in our coming episodes only here in our Journey to the Unknown. Meantime, please click the heart button and talk to me in the comment section. Hasta la vista baby!

(Reference: History Stories)