How Does The Internet Work And How Was It Invented?

Internet is built upon a collection of networks that covers the world. These networks contain differnt types of computers, and somehow, something must hold the whole thing togather. That something is TCP/IP.

TCP/IP is the common name of over 100 protocols that are used to connect computers and networks. The actual name TCP/IP comes from TCP ( Transmission Control Protocol) and IP ( Internet Protocol ). Within the Internet, data is broken into small packets called fragments. For example, say that you send a long mail on the other side of the country. TCP will divide the message into packets.

Each packet is marked with a sequence number. Each host on the Internet is assigned a unique 32-bit (For IP version 4) IP address. Data are carried out in the form of packets which contain source and destination IP addresses. Internet routers maintain a view of the network topology in the form of routing tables. These tables are consulted when making packet routing decisions. The process of routing involves inspecting the destination address contained in the packet and based on the contents of the routing table, determining the next hop router to which the packet should be relayed. Each router along the source and the destination nodes repeat this process until the packet is finally delivered to the destination host.

From its origin as a US government research project, the Internet has grown to become a major component of the global worldwide network infrastructure, linking over 100,000 networks, 50,000 domains, millions of machines, and tens of millions of users around the world. Internet is expanding at a rate normally associated with nuclear chain reaction. Over 130 countries have full TCP/IP Internet connectivity. With the introduction of WWW ( World Wide Web ), an architectural framework for accessing linked documents spread over thousands of machines all over the Internet, it has become a part of daily life.


Many people think that the Internet is a recent innovation, when in fact the fundamental ideas behind the Internet have been around for over a quarter century.

The development of what we now call the Internet started in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first satellite, beating the United States into space. The powers behind the American military at the time became highly alarmed as this meant that the USSR could theoretically launch bombs into space, and then drop them anywhere on earth. In 1958 the concerns of people in the US military triggered the creation of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).