The History of the Internet

[MUSIC] 0:00 Have you tried using a computer without emailing to communicate with friends, or 0:05 a web browser to learn about the world or watch funny cat videos? 0:09 A computer that can't talk to other computers is a lonely device full 0:13 of information it can't share and without an easy way to find new information. 0:17 Computers can talk and share things thanks to the incredible network 0:23 of interconnected computers called the Internet. 0:26 Thanks to the Internet, exchanging information is done quickly and 0:30 efficiently. 0:33 In fact, sharing information between computers 0:34 is the primary job of the Internet. 0:37 However, computers weren't always connected to each other. 0:40 In the early days of computing, back in the 1950s, computers were as 0:43 big as a room and had a lot less power than a mobile phone does today. 0:48 In those days, one computer couldn't talk to another computer, 0:52 even if it were in the same room. 0:56 But in the 1960s, scientists in the United States 0:58 started working on a way to connect computers around the country. 1:02 A government agency called the Advanced Research Project Agency, also known as 1:06 ARPA, gave lots of money to scientists to find out a way to make this happen. 1:11 In 1962 the scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1:16 came up with an idea for a galactic network of computers. 1:21 And in the mid-1960s something known as packet switching was invented, 1:25 which we'll dive into a little more later. 1:29 In 1969, everything came together and 1:32 the ARPANET, that's what we called the Internet back then, became a reality. 1:35 It wasn't much. 1:39 A computer at the University of California Los Angeles 1:41 talked to another computer 562 miles away at Stanford University. 1:44 The computer at UCLA sent the message log in to the computer at Stanford. 1:49 Only the letters l and o made it before the entire network crashed, 1:54 but they didn't let this stop them. 1:59 In the 1970s and 80s the Internet grew and grew connecting computers from 2:01 around the world, but it wasn't until 1991 that the web came along riding on 2:06 the back of the World Wide Network, created by the Internet. 2:11 So how exactly does the Internet work? 2:16 Good question. 2:18 Let me show you in the next few videos. 2:19