History of the Internet

Having grown up using the internet as a simple yet vital resource for everything from academic research to looking up directions to the mall, I never really stopped to think about how it developed. This video helped put the internet in perspective for me. It's almost mind-boggling that computers were once so large they had to be stored in cooled rooms.

I liked how the video attempted to put highly technical terminology into "English". Although some terminology was way over my head, I was able to understand the basic influences on the creation of the internet. I find it most interesting that the military heavily influenced the development of the internet through the necessity for a distributed network system.

Although at times the video moved too quickly for me to fully process, the graphics helped me focus and follow the flow of information between computers, networks, and phone lines as well as the progression and growth of the internet as a final product. The video reinforced that the internet was not just "born"; it was the compilation of many working concepts that grew over the course of decades. ARPANET, Cyclades, the RAND military network, and National Physical Network each developed separately, but provided innovations crucial to the formation of the internet as we know it. As the narrator stated, we take the internet for granted today because of its apparent simplicity. Its history, however, can show us the complications, adjustments, trials, and errors that afforded the simplicity the internet provides users with today.