On October 4, 1957 the world changed dramatically. The cold war, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union became much colder. The Soviets showed the world that the U.S. was not the most technologically advanced country. With one small piece of equipment the Soviet Union showed the world that

they could deliver a nuclear payload anywhere in the world. This piece of equipment was Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite sent into space by mankind. Later that year the United States government formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense. The purpose of ARPA was to reestablish the U.S.’s lead in technology.

ARPA was in charge of designing and building a redundant military research network of computers. The purpose of this network was to decentralize command and control of their nuclear missiles and supporting staff. That way if Washington D.C. was attacked and destroyed there would still be communications and control over the U.S. nuclear assets. This was the birth of the first Intranet.

In 1969 ARPA set up the first four nodes of what was then known as ARPANET. They were connected at UCLA, Stanford, the University of California Santa Barbara, and at the University of Utah. By 1983 ARPANET had reached over 500 nodes and was broken into to two different sections: Military and Civilian. Each of these two divisions received their own names and the name ARPANET ceased to exist. The civilian division became the public Internet. Later that year both networks were converted to TCP/IP, which is the language that all computers on the Internet use to communicate with each other.

By 1992 the network had grown to over 1,000,000 nodes. During this year the World-Wide Web was introduced, which is commonly known as the “Internet.” In order to use the World-Wide Web, web browsers were created to take HTML documents and display them in a graphical way on the computer screen. One of the early web browsers was created by Marc Andressen and called Mosaic. He later went on to form Netscape. With this new technology anybody could create HTML documents and host them on web servers. These documents form together to create “sites.”

The web created what many people refer to as “the new economy.” Business location is no longer relevant. A business can operate in the most desolate spot on earth, and as long as it has a connection to the Internet, it can sell to billions of people throughout the world. Some of today’s largest retails do not have any brick and mortar locations. They do all of their business over the Internet.

The Internet has changed the way the world communicates. Email has made waiting for the postal system almost passet. Communication of information can now be done almost instantaneously and at any time over the Internet. A person no longer needs to go to a store to see or research a product. They can now connect to the Internet, go to the store’s web site and see the products, all from the comfort of their own home. If a person has question about a product they can email the store and receive the answer on their computer.

Today the popularity of the Internet has exploded to the point that it has become mainstream. What began as 4 nodes connected together for ARPA now has hundreds of millions of nodes all around the world. It has become one of the most accessible ways of getting information. Some sites are developed by traditional news organizations such as ABC, NBC, and the Wall Street Journal. Other sites are developed by individuals, which are now able to beat traditional news organizations, in getting new information out to the world first.

Businesses are taking the Internet technology back to its original purpose. They need to be able to communicate internally across the world with out interruption. They also need to keep internal information confidential. This is what today’s intranets are set up to do. It is made easily accessible, but only to the people that the company gives rights.