Birth and evolution of the internet

There are a couple of ways to look at it. The Internet didn't come directly from ARPAnet. ARPAnet was an x.25 network that ran oon dedicated wirelines and it remained an x.25 network until it was decommissioned.

The first actual Internet (IP based network) was built from the remains of NSFnet which had been run by the National Science Foundation here in the U.S.

But the technology to turn NSFnet into an IP based network came from the R&D done on ARPAnet.

So if you look at it from the physical plant and hardware side, it came from NSFnet. If you look at it from a technology and protocol standpoint it evolved from ARPAnet. (DARPA issued the contract to BBN to develop a network and Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, who both worked for BBN developed the IP protocol to fufill that contract.)

Most of the layer 7 protocols used on the initial Internet (i.e. FTP, NTP, POP, Telnet, etc..) had been developed and used on ARPAnet and brought over to the IP based networks as well.

x.25?

x.25 was a packet switched network protocol. It would correlate to todays layer 1, 2 and 3 in the OSI model and was accepted by the ITU as an offical protocol in the early 1980s (after it had been in use for years).

"Frame Relay" is x.25 with all error checking and error correction stripped out of it.

I agree with Fishin on the basic physical evolution of the net.

But when you say "Internet" these days, you're almost talking about a 'perception' thing, rather than a physical packet-switching thing.

For most people, the "Internet" is almost indistinguishable from the World Wide Web (and Email). Hypertext and Email are two very different systems, but they are the main elements which have most directly effected the inclusion of non-techies into the new communications medium.

The Web in particular is a striking example because it had such a dramatic ability to bring visual components and point-and-click function to information retrieval.

The Internet (IP Protocols) had been around in various capacities for years, but it wasn't until Hypertext that it began to draw an audience of casual users. Along with the audience came funding for advertising, and the cycle had begun.

The Internet is really just a network structure using IP to distribute data in various forms. But the higher level products which run on the IP structure are what people more easily associate with "The Internet".

So...wait a minute...Al Gore didn't invent the internet in his shed?