How the First Computer Network Changed the World

STORY OF INTERNET
Part 1: What Provoked the Idea of the Internet
Part 2: The First Computer Network To Be Created
Part 3: How the First Computer Network Changed the World ( Current post)

The first Network ever to be created was called ARPAnet. It was ARPA's project and the man incharge was Bob Taylor.

Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) was the highest bidding team, and the effects of ARPAnet began to be fully experienced immediately the Network became a living reality. The fear of losing computer power that enveloped the hosts during the busy discussions, when ARPAnet was still a plan, was confirmed otherwise. Contrary to the Initial worries, the hosts gained from the communication network. They could work together on projects and not repeat each others work. And this saved as well as earned ARPA money just as Bob Taylor had contempleted.

Furthermore, it was not long when an engineer at BBN, Cambridge, Massachusetts, could contact the telephone companies and...

"Your line between Santa Barbara and Utah ain't working properly"
"At which end are you?" The telephone companies could ask curiously.
"Neither, I'm in Cambridge"
"But how can you..." The telephone crew were confused.

This was because the IMPs (small mainframe computers that that were connecting two host computers facilitating their communication) were designed to make constant checks on the condition of the network, making its engineers at a position that they would know more about the performance of the telephone lines than the telephone companies that owned and operated them.

So were there new possibilities, for instance, BBN was able to send new a software to the IMPs, immediately, as soon as they were coded. The BBN could also fix an IMP problem from Cambridge, Massachusetts - many hundreds of Kilometers away. But the biggest surprise was that the network was soon being used mostly for something that was never part of Bob Taylor's plan - chat. Technically, the network worked exactly as it was designed to. Yet by 1973, three-quarters of all the traffic on ARPAnet was nothing to do woth sharing data or programs or logging onto distance computers. It was electronic mail - e-mail.

Ray Tomlinson was the first peson to send an e-mail on ARPAnet. Ray, an engineer and in 1972, invented a simple program for sending files between computers. The software opened a connection, sent a file to another computer and then sent a message back to say that the file had arrived safely at its destination. Since e-mail boxes in computers are really just files, the next step was simple. Tomlinson changed his program so that it carried a mail message from one computer and added it to a mail box file of another computer. This is how the era began.

But the speed at which e-mail spread was surprising. Almost as soon as it was introduced, it took over the network. Today, there are more individual messages sent on the Internet more than data of any other kind. And, being the person who chose the '@' sign, which means at in e-mail address, Ray Tomlinson has left his mark on every single one of the billions of e-mails that have been sent ever since 1972.

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