How the Internet Has Evolved in the Past Decade
We all know that the Internet has become a great part of our everyday life. Now we have a wide range of Internet services and their number continues to grow.
But it was not always like this. So let’s track how internet technologies developed and what has happened in the last decade.
As we know it, the history of the Internet began with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. This began with point-to-point communication between mainframe computers and terminals, expanded to point-to-point connections between computers and then early research into packet switching.
In 1982 the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced. Since the mid-1990s the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) "phone calls", two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping site.
I have recently found an interesting article by Ryan Jennings Smith at EzineArticles.com who analyzed what had happed to the Internet in the last 10 years:
“Backup, storage, bandwidth and more have all been revolutionized in the last decade, and all this has created a global network, a global community, and a global consumer environment.
The biggest, and most important, improvement to the internet in the past ten years is quite simply speed. As the old copper cables get ripped out and replaced with fiber optics, broadband speeds can increase dramatically, not to mention cheaper, faster broadband packages providing faster access to consumers.
This faster access radically changed the internet from a slow cumbersome beast, to an agile resource of information and shopping.
When the Internet began to speed up, things also began to speed up for hosting services. To keep up with the new demand, and technologies such as streaming video, hosting services had to look at several new solutions. No longer could they run a desktop computer as a server, they needed to high speed backups, load balancing, and later on, cloud servers.
The backing up of servers came along with raid technology, but backing up your data did not help you if your website suddenly found itself becoming popular.
In more recent years cloud servers have come to the front of internet hosting. Cloud servers are the best way to deal with high traffic loads, and are capable of handling huge amounts of data. This has again changed how the internet works, by giving people the option to host huge files for download, without worrying about hosting charges.
It is this computing power that has allowed companies such as Amazon, Google, and eBay to prosper. By using cloud servers these companies can meet the demand of millions of daily users, with quick page loading times, and hardly any technical glitches.”
And our company is proud to be at the cutting edge of new technologies, having the fastest Microwave infrastructure in the Las Vegas Valley, and offering cloud computing services. We are ready and willing to work with the newest internet technologies of the nowadays and the future.
We are sure the Internet will continue to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking. François Baccelli and Jon Crowcroft inform us at their article “Future Internet Technology – Introduction” at http://ercim-news.ercim.eu that currently a number of global and local programs of research (in the US, EU and further afield, e.g. Asia) are looking at future network architectures and building testbeds to evaluate new protocols and systems based on these new ideas. The most notable, in the US are the NSF Find program and the GENI project to build infrastructure. In Europe we find a number of projects, with some interesting high-level thinking (e.g. the Eiffel project) and a set of testbed initiatives under the FIRE Program.
Let’s see how things will progress in the next decade!
