Although to the youngest it may seem that the Internet is something that has always existed, and to the elderly that it is something very recent, the correct term is -as in so many other things- the medium, and ARPANET represents a step in this long, while short, history.
Military origin
ARPANET is the direct precedent of the Internet, a network that came into operation in October 1969 after several years of planning.
Its promoter was DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a US government agency, dependent on the Defense Department of that country, which still exists.
Originally, it connected research centers and academic centers to facilitate the exchange of information between them in order to promote research. Yes, being a Department of Defense undertaking, it goes without saying that arms research was also part of this exchange of information.
It is also explained, without this being unfounded, that the ARPANET design was made thinking that it could withstand a nuclear attack by the USSR and, hence, probably the great resistance that the network of networks has shown in the face of major disasters. and attacks.
It was the first network in which a packet communication protocol was put into use that did not require central computers, but was - as is the current Internet - totally decentralized.
On the way to creating the Internet
In 1983, the separation of the US military network (MILNET) from ARPANET materialized, which had been growing in the civil sector, and which already presented risks for US cybersecurity, although not like now, of course.
NSF (National Science Foundation) soon afterwards absorbed ARPANET, which ended up disappearing in 1989, subsumed by the brand new Internet.
Precursor of some technical milestones
The historical imprint of ARPANET on the current Internet can be seen in multiple ways. The most obvious is the use of TCP / IP as the standard communication protocol used in the network of networks, which was released in 1972 by ARPANET.
Other Internet services that are now less evident to us, with a website (which is just another service) that has taken over everything, also date back to that time; E-mail, invented by Ray Tomlinson in 1972 was one of them, and to this day we still use it to communicate, although with interfaces very different from the originals.
Another service that also originated from the ARPANET was FTP (File Transfer Protocol), which allowed, and still allows, the storage and downloading of files.
Photos: iStock - gece33 / Alex Belomlinsky
