A Brief Story of Evolution and Widespread Adoption of The Internet

“Internetworking Architecture” (Leiner et al. 2009) was a fundamental design that enable machines and computers to communicate via internet regardless of underlying communication protocol.

TCP/IP were implemented in UNIX operating system triggers a widespread adoption of internet (Leiner et al. 2009). Dispersion of protocols began in research community. Recall that predecessor of internet project (it was named “internetworking” at the time) was funded with the goal to increase speed and efficiency of research collaborations. The speed of adoption within educational institution continued to be exponential after free dissemination of UNIX operating system by AT&T which started in 1973 Version 5 UNIX. The same exponential trends persisted when free dissemination of Version 6 UNIX license in 1975 allowed commercial used by companies. Internet was well established by 1985 as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers. At the same time, other communities started to use internet as preferred choice for daily computers communication.

The first and the most used “killer app” that build on internet technology was email (electronic mail) among other “kill apps” including file transfer and Telnet (Leiner et al. 2009). Telnet enables remote login to computers. I summarized app feature of email, file transfer, and Telnet as “network of communication,” “network of file-based information,” and “network of remote access.” Adoption of internet is further accelerated after introduction of browsers and world wide web (WWW) (Leiner et al. 2009) .

This progression obeys a philosophy that I proposed in my blog titled “Evolution of Asset Transitions.” In short, according to “Evolution of Asset Transitions,” the new object is internet which enable creation of new processes including email, file transfers, and TCP.

That’s it. Peace.

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