Alsina González
Specialist journalist and researcher
Despite the fact that 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, story.
military origin
ARPANET is the direct predecessor of the Internet, a network that went live in October 1969 after several years of planning.
Its promoter was DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an American government agency, dependent on the Department of Defense 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 involved in this exchange of information.
It is also explained, without being without foundation, that the design of the ARPANET was carried out thinking that it could resist a nuclear attack by the USSR and, from there, 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 road to the creation of the Internet
In 1983, the separation of the US military network (MILNET) from the ARPANET materialized, which had been growing in the civilian sector, and which already presented risks for US cybersecurity, although not like now, of course.
The NSF (National Science Foundation) soon after absorbed ARPANET, which ended up disappearing in 1989, subsumed by the brand new Internet.
Forerunner of some technical milestones
The historical imprint of the ARPANET on today’s 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 the ARPANET.
Other Internet services that are now less obvious to us, with a website (which is nothing more than another service) that has monopolized everything, also go back to that time; email, invented by Ray Tomlinson in 1972, was one of them, and today we still use it to communicate, although with interfaces very different from the originals.
Another service that also originated on the ARPANET was FTP (File Transfer Protocol), which allowed and still allows the storage and downloading of files.
Photos: iStock – gece33 / Alex Belomlinsky
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