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if you have a smartphone you probably
have access to the Internet almost
everywhere you go being it'll access
what is basically the sum total of human
knowledge whenever you want that's a new
thing pretty cool after the United
Nations actually declared uncensored
Internet access a human right that
deserves protection but it actually took
a long time for the internet to become
publicly accessible at all even in the
country where it started the internet
grew from four computers in the western
US in 1969 to a global network of
networks connecting more than twenty
thousand computers by the end of 1987
but it was still restricted to specific
universities and corporations which use
it for specific types of collaboration
and research so how do we get from
20,000 computers on guarded networks in
1987 to the fundamental human right to
Internet access just thirty years later
in other words when did the regular
Joe's start logging on some of the first
tastes of the future came in the 1970s
when a few companies started selling
access to the network
they were standalone networks that
weren't connected to the main central
network that was the internet but their
users could do everything from sending
emails to checking updated weather
reports to playing games and chatting on
some of the first ever instant messaging
programs and on some that works like
Compu serves micro net users could even
read stories from major newspapers write
on their home computers like imagine a
newspaper on your computer but as great
as these networks were they still had
their limits some of them like micronet
were only available nights and weekends
when businesses that normally use
computers networks were closed and they
were all pretty much isolated Islands
since they weren't directly connected to
each other or to the broader Internet
because throughout the 80s no matter how
big these private networks got they
weren't allowed on the Internet
ARPANET and the other networks that
formed the basis of the internet were
government-run and government-funded so
the businesses and universities using
them weren't allowed to have any
commercial traffic on the network it was
fine to use the internet to download
some data or email your colleagues a
copy of your latest paper but you
supposed to advertise a new product on
there and you definitely weren't
supposed to charge the general public to
come online the internet was supposed to
be for research not for making money
which is pretty weird to think about
considering how many of us use the
Internet these days to make a living
around the same time ARPANET
administrators were looking to hand off
responsibility for maintaining the
Internet ARPANET had long since
accomplished its goals and the
Department of Defense wanted to move on
the National Science Foundation's huge
Network NSF net seemed to be the best
candidate
it started in 1986 and grew so quickly
after connecting to ARPANET that less
than a year later it already needed
major upgrades to handle all the new
traffic and 1990 NSFNET officially
replaced ARPANET as the backbone of the
Internet and it's more than a half a
million users but even before ARPANET
was completely out of the picture a
couple enterprising companies were
connecting regular people to the
Internet though there's some debate
about which company was there first
and when NSFNET also had a policy about
banning commercial traffic on the
network but in 1988 they decided to try
connecting a couple of those private
networks email servers to an assessment
and a year later users of CompuServe and
an email service called MCI mail could
send the first commercial emails across
the internet the next year 1989 we got
the first Internet service providers or
ISPs these were companies that usually
didn't have any network of their own
they just connected people to a local
network and to the Internet you'll hear
a lot of people say that the first
commercial ISP was a company called the
world which opened near Boston in
December 1989 but others say the first
one was done in Australia instead and
then there are people who tell you that
there weren't any true Internet service
providers until Congress passed a law in
1992 allowing for commercial traffic on
NSFNET the truth is of course that lots
of different companies opened their
doors or like their wires between 1989
and 1992 what all of them offered
slightly different services some were
just email somewhere their own networks
that were partly connected to the
internet and some offered internet
access without an online community of
their own so in the situation different
companies can all kind of claim that
they were the first more ISPs were
created in the next few years and in
1995 NSF
net shut down for good and handed
everything over to the ISPs but even in
the early 1990s the Internet was nothing
like it is today for one thing of course
it was slow go so slow at downloading a
picture of Captain Picard took like half
the day not that I know that from
experience to connect to the network
your computer placed a phone call to the
network through a modem which translated
between the digital signals being used
in computers and the analog signals used
in landline phones then your computer
would talk to the other computers on the
network using the phone lines between
them this way of getting online became
known as dial-up and if you've ever used
a dial-up internet connection you know
exactly how frustratingly slow it could
be though to be clear when we were first
doing it it did not seem slow it seemed
like magic convinced phone lines already
Criss crossed the United States when
ARPANET was invented it just made sense
to use them instead of trying to invent
something completely new part of why
dial-up was so slow is that there's a
limit to how quickly you can cram
information down a phone line to
transmit a lot of information you need a
signal with a really high frequency
meaning it can change very quickly and
for a signal sent down phone lines that
would mean you would need a really
high-pitched sound but phone lines
weren't designed for that sort of signal
they were designed for phone calls and
even though new parents might disagree
humans just don't make sounds that are
that high pitch the phone lines weren't
designed to transmit signals with very
high frequencies that you would need to
transmit a lot of information all at
once
the first thing a modem did when it
connected to a network was to check the
highest frequency signal that the wires
could handle and then it slowed the
firehose of ones and zeros coming out of
your computer down to that speed there's
another reason why the internet was
different back when the first ISPs were
popping up back in 1989 there wasn't a
single website because back in 1989
there was no such thing as the Web today
a lot of people use the terms Internet
and web pretty much interchangeably but
they're actually different things the
internet came more than a decade before
the web internet is a shortened form of
the word internet working and it was
coined in the 70s to refer to the
physical cables and computers connecting
all together today it usually refers
more specifically to all the computers
running programs that let them
communicate with each other across the
giant internet network the internet
began with networks that were designed
as a way of remotely sharing programs
files and access to computers then
programs like email were added over time
these programs tended to organize the
information a bit like a tree or even
like a whole forest to get to a specific
branch of a program or file you had to
climb all the way up the trunk and then
down a whole bunch of branches and then
to get somewhere else you had to go all
the way back to the trunk and over to
another set of branches from unit it was
small it never took too long to get back
to where you started from so you could
go somewhere else but as the internet
grew it got harder and harder to
navigate unless you knew exactly where
you were going even smaller individual
networks like the one at CERN in Europe
were getting in a hand with a pane to
find everything you needed on the
network especially if you didn't know
exactly where to find the thing you were
looking for
so you've wasted a bunch of time
navigating all those different trees so
in 1989 a scientist named Tim
berners-lee with some help from his
colleague Robert Caillou started working
on a better way to arrange all that
information berners-lee is often
credited with inventing the web and for
good reason yeah the big idea to sort of
flatten the trees structure instead of
each file being like its own little
isolated branch any document or file
could direct people to other related
files so they could easily go from one
to the next and he knew exactly the
perfect tool for the task
hypertext hypertext was invented back in
the 60s as a way of going directly from
one part of a document to another like
skipping straight from the table of
contents to chapter 10 without scrolling
all the way there when people started
using it to link between different
documents and it was incorporated into
all kinds of programs throughout the 80s
berners-lee made the hypertext concept
the primary way of navigating what he
started calling the world wide web with
hyperlinks connecting different web
pages the web was a hit at CERN and when
it was made public in 1993 the final
major piece of today's internet was in
place syn berners-lee is the reason most
web sites you go to have addresses that
start with HTTP colon slash slash WWH
TTP stands for hypertext Transfer
Protocol the set of programs used to
read documents with hyperlinks sometimes
you'll see HTTP which is just a more
secure version of those programs the
colon slash slash is a way of
introducing what comes next and the WW
says that the page is part of the world
wide web soon a whole bunch of different
programs
up for accessing these new hyperlinked
web pages each interpreting and
presenting them slightly differently
depending on what their users wanted
these were the early web browsers the
ancestors of whatever you're using today
to watch this video
like Netscape Navigator remember
Netscape it was first released in 1994
and the code for it was eventually
incorporated into Firefox with the web
and the internet finally paired up and
publicly accessible the number of
computers using the internet exploded in
the 90s and billions of dollars were
poured into startup companies on the
internet throughout the decade wealthy
investors piled cash on companies like
etoys comm and gov works and WorldCom
both of these startups went bankrupt
around the turn of the millennium when
the.com bubble burst and giant
corporations like Google and Facebook
rose from the ashes so we'll have to
wait until the next episode of this
series to talk about why and how the
internet went from a graveyard of failed
startups to the place it is today which
is you know more than just a graveyard
of failed startups thanks for watching
this episode of scishow which was
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you
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