COM125 Assignment 1: A long time ago, in a military installation far far away..

Ok, so the advent of the Internet did not exactly have grand fanfare and scrolling text to herald it's arrival. Instead, it was a rather quiet affair - evolving slowly from the precursor of the Internet, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which was a military directive. Most people didn't even realize the significant milestone on 10.30pm October 29, 1969 - when the first message was sent from one computer to another computer on UCLA's grounds, where ARPANET was deployed.

From then on, technologies for the fledging ARPANET burgeoned, with the first e-mail being invented and sent in 1971. By 1973, e-mail traffic made up 75% of the total volume of information exchanged on the ARPANET. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) was also invented in 1973, which allowed files to be sent from one location to another. These advances pushed and encouraged development of ARPANET into something more accessible and readily available for the public and commercial entities.

Fast forwards years later and ARPANET is now one of the fundamental components of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Many of the technologies used and developed during that time now form the basis of the different uses of the Internet. For instance, emails are still widely in use. FTP capabilities have grown cumulatively over the years, and allow for global access of files at speeds previously unimagined when ARPANET was developed.

The Internet today would definitely not have been able to progress at the speed which it did were it not for the development of ARPANET. The technologies discovered in the implementation of ARPANET formed the backbone of the World Wide Web's infrastructure in the early years. These technologies led to the development of other advancements, such as TCP/IP, and SMTP - protocols which have helped stabilize the Internet and from which more uses have been derived.

Today, we can even send video and audio signals over the Internet and talk to loved ones half a world away. All that, from a dingy laboratory in UCLA in 1969.