In a sense, the Internet can be said to be the product of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.In 1962, in order to confront the former Soviet Union militarily, the US Department of Defense put forward the idea of designing a decentralized command system, that is, it is composed of decentralized command points. When some nodes or communication lines are destroyed, other command points can still work normally, and these command points can bypass those destroyed nodes or information lines and continue to maintain contact.
In 1969, in order to verify the above concept, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the US Department of Defense funded the establishment of an experimental network called ARPANET. At that time, it mainly consisted of four hosts located in different geographical locations in the United States.This ARPANET is the earliest prototype of the Internet.
By 1972, ARPANET had received as many as 40 hosts, and its functions were as follows:You can send small text files between (that is, e-mail applications on the Internet);File transfer protocol can be used to send large text files (that is, FTP applications on the Internet);One computer can simulate the terminal of another remote computer to use the resources on the remote computer (that is, the telnet application for remote login on the Internet).It can be seen that E-mail, FTP and Telnet are the early application tools on ARPANET and still play an important role in today's Internet applications.
ARPANET, as the early backbone of the Internet, the success of its experiment determines the basic theory of the Internet.Technically, one of ARPANET's major contributions to the Internet is the feasible application of TCP/IP protocol, which has laid a solid foundation for the first rapid development of the Internet.
2. Internet infrastructure
In the early 1980s, ARPANET achieved great success because of its military nature and its control by the US governmentWebsite productionTo solve this problem, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has invested a lot of money to establish six supercomputer centers and participate in the construction of the national backbone network,The six supercomputer centers are connected by 56kbps communication lines, and the NSFNET network is established, and TCP/IP technology that has proved to be very successful in ARPANET network is applied.
In the mid-1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States encouraged and hoped that computers from universities and research institutes would connect to NSFNET in order to achieve the maximum sharing of resources. From 1986 to 1991, the number of subnets of NSFNET increased rapidly from 100 to more than 3000.
In 1986, NSFNET was officially put into operation after its completion, realizing the interconnection and communication with other existing and newly built networks, and becoming the foundation of today's Internet.
In June 1990, NSFNET replaced ARPANET as the backbone of the Internet.
It can be said that the emergence of NSFNET has made the greatest contribution to the Internet by opening it to the whole society. It allows universities or private research institutions to take over the network, which has promoted the rapid commercialization of the Internet and its second leap forward development.
3. Initial Internet structure
With the development of the Internet, the four early backbone networks in the United States interconnected and provided access services to the outside world, forming the basic structure of the early Internet, as shown in Figure 1-4.
The middle part is the four platforms of the Internet in the United States, which formed the backbone network of the Internet in the early days. They are respectively the famous American communication company network (Sprint link), the energy science network (ESNET), the national aerospace science network (NASASI), and the national science foundation network (NSFNET). On the left and right ends are four exchange centers connected with the Asia Pacific region, Europe, and other regions.These four switching centers are two Federal Internet Exchange (FIX-E and FIX-W), one Global Internet eXchange (GIX) and one Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX,Finally, a large logical network interconnected by the networks of all countries in the world will be formed.Today, the Internet does not belong to any country or specific international entity, but a global collection of information resources.It is based on the common communication protocol (TCP/IP) and aims to exchange information resources for the world to provide information exchange and resource sharing.