Taking into account that we constantly talk about the news and improvements that digital marketing and technology bring us, we consider that it is a good time to dedicate a post to what today seems essential to us: the Internet . Today we discuss the history of the Internet, starting by taking into account that it was born, at the time, as a military project to be able to ensure communications between different parts of the United States in case of suffering a major attack but, luckily, it never It came to be used in this situation and today it is a fundamental tool for many of us that has changed the way we act, communicate and work.
We are going to see step by step how the stages of this process were.
History of the Internet: index
- How the Internet Was Born: The Cold War
- History of the Internet: ARPA
- History of the Internet: ARPANET
- History of the Internet: From ARPANET to WWW
- History of the Internet: Adapting Business
- The era of Social Networks
- History of the Internet; the rise of eCommerce
How the Internet Was Born: The Cold War
First of all, let's put ourselves in context. To begin the history of the Internet, we go back to 1947 when the Cold War began , a confrontation that began at the end of World War II. As you well know, it is a conflict caused by the tension between the western-capitalist bloc led by the United States and the eastern-communist bloc then led by the Soviet Union .
In it, two opposing models faced each other, struggling to implant their method and ideology throughout the world. The reason for calling this confrontation a "cold war" is because they never faced each other directly but, in return, they were involving the rest of the countries with the aim of expanding their model.
After a long period of fighting, during the last stage, the Soviet economic model stagnated and the United States was militarily reinforced , which then placed it in a favorable situation. In 1985 Gorbachev became Secretary General and was the one who promoted a series of reforms known as Perestroika (restructuring). After several approaches, in late 1989 Gorbachev and Reagan's successor, George HW Bush, declared the Cold War over . This was followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as such.
History of the Internet: ARPA
In 1957 the USSR launched the first artificial satellite in history, Sputnik 1, and, in this context, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA and linked to the United States , is organized in the United States. Defense Department. This was created in response to the technological and military challenges of the then USSR and, a decade later, it would be considered the organization that laid the foundations of what would be known as the Internet decades later.
Great strides were made over the next few years. In 1962, Paul Baran , a researcher for the United States Government, presented a communications system that, using computers connected to a decentralized network, was immune to external attacks. In the event that one or more nodes were destroyed, the others could continue communicating without any problem.
This project was based on the work of Leonard Kleinrock who a year earlier published from MIT the packet switching theory that raised the feasibility of using this revolutionary technique. This theory is based on the fact that all the information that leaves a device is divided into blocks to be transmitted over the network and these blocks are called packets.
Work continued to establish a network that could be accessed from anywhere in the world, which they called the "galactic network." In 1965 a TX2 computer in Massachusetts was connected to a Q-32 in California via a switched but low speed and still limited telephone line. It worked and then allowed to work in a connected way but, as is easy to imagine today, the system was inadequate.
History of the Internet: ARPANET
In the following years, research continued until in 1969 Michel Elie , considered one of the pioneers of the Internet, entered UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) and joined ARPA with a research grant. At the end of this year , the UCLA computer was connected to another from the SRI (Stanford Research Institute).
Shortly after, there were already four interconnected American universities . This network was called ARPANET and the objective of this development was to maintain communications in the event of war, given the situation of uncertainty and fear of the moment. It was quite a revolution since until then they only had a centralized network that was considered very insecure in the event of war because the system could easily be blocked.
In 1970 ARPANET is consolidated . Ray Tomlinson lays the foundation for what is now known as email . This need arises because the developers needed a coordination mechanism that they covered with this system. Remember that we recently told you about him and his remarkable role in this article (with video included).
The network went from the military agencies to the universities and defense projects of the country with increasing force. Scientists used and developed it to allow, also, to share opinions and to establish collaborations in works. In 1972 it already included 50 universities and research centers that were distributed throughout the United States. A year later, ARPANET already established connections with other countries such as England and Norway.
With the rise of the commercialization of computers, the number of connected computers was increasing and from the 80s other networks appeared which, as we can imagine, caused chaos due to the great variety of formats of connected computers. Once it is unified and consolidated, the Internet is born.
History of the Internet: From ARPANET to WWW
When was the Internet born? (at least, in bulk)
It is the year 1983 that is usually marked as the year the "Internet was born . " It was then that the United States Department of Defense decided to use the TCP / IP protocol in its Arpanet network, thus creating the Arpa Internet network. Over the years it stuck with the name of just "Internet."
On March 12, 1989 Tim Berners Lee first described the hypertext transfer protocol that would lead to the first web using three new resources: HTML, HTTP, and a program called Web Browser. One year later, the Internet was born in a closed way within CERN, and in August 1991 , at last, users outside CERN began to be able to access that information.
The World Wide Web grew rapidly: in 1993 there were only 100 World Wide Web Sites and in 1997 there were already more than 200,000. And from then on, the exciting history of the Internet continues to this day. What a great job! With how easy everything seems 😉
What does the Internet mean?
The name of the Internet comes from a need that, precisely, was born to solve: speed up communications. And is that the Internet is nothing more than an abbreviation of the terms Network (network, in English) and Interconnect (interconnection). In any case, we could say that the Internet is an interconnected global network, something very similar to what the famous WWW means, world wide web.
History of the Internet: Adapting Business
To situate ourselves and put ourselves in context, I want to share an example that I read in the book « Your digital marketing plan» by Mau Santambrosio and Patricia de Andrés, in which they explained the case of the Encyclopaedia Britannica . I think it is a good example in this article on the history of the Internet.
This encyclopedia, in 1990, was a benchmark in its field. Its 32 volumes had a cost close to 1,400 dollars and, in the United States alone, some 100,000 encyclopedias were sold a year . Six years later, with the disconcerting arrival of the Internet and the great change that it brought, this figure dropped to 3,000 . Those years were tough. Things were changing and his product had to change too if it was to survive.
In March 2012 , after 244 years, the end of an era for the company was announced: they would no longer print the paper version of the encyclopedia. Then? Did they close the company? Well no. They anticipated and were able to foresee that that moment could come, so in 2012 its printed edition already only represented 1% of the business and the company had already been showing benefits for 9 years, so they were preparing for such a moment in those previous years. This case seems to me a great example to understand how complex and important it has been to adapt to the digital sector and especially difficult for companies as traditional and with a product as established as in this case that we are commenting on.
The growing number of internet users in the world
Year after year, the number of Internet users in the world increases exponentially, a figure that has been boosted by the great penetration of mobile devices.
According to the data from the Digital 2021 report, carried out by We Are Social and Hootsuite, the number of internet users in the world has reached 4,660 million people, which represents 59.5% of the population (7,830 million people).
In January 2021, unique users from mobile devices reached 66.6% of the world's population , that is, 5.22 billion people, which represents 1.8% more compared to the data in January 2020 , an increase of 93 million users.
Countries with the highest internet penetration
In detail, this report shows us the ranking of countries with the highest internet penetration, and once again this list is led by the United Arab Emirates with 99% penetration, followed by Denmark (98%) and Sweden (98% ). In this edition, Spain falls 3 positions with respect to the results of the previous report, reaching 17th place with a penetration of 91% , the same as a year ago.
The countries with the lowest internet penetration are North Korea (0.1%), Eritrea (6.9%) and Sudan (8%).
The era of Social Networks
We could say that the history of social networks began in the mid-90s with the creation of GeoCities, in which users were recommended to create their web pages and install them in “neighborhoods”, where they would have a relationship with users from the same neighborhood .
Anyway, the first social network like the ones we have today was sixdegrees.com, which is no longer accessible. Following the theory of the 6 degrees of separation, sixdegrees allowed its users to connect by invitation with other users creating community, and allowed them to send messages and see when they connected. It had more than 1 million users, although it disappeared in 2001.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube
With the passage of time, social networks evolved, creating in 2002 Friendster, a social network for video game lovers. In 2003 MySpace, Linkedin (social network in the employment environment) and in 2004 a Harvard university named Mark Zuckerberg created the social network that today is the most important in the world: Facebook.
In mid- 2005 , legend has it that at a party in San Francisco, 3 Paypal workers recorded a video and had difficulty sending it to their friends. Due to this inconvenience , the idea of creating YouTube , the most important video social network today, arose . The first video uploaded to the network did not take long to arrive: 04/23/2005
2006 was a very important year in the history of the Internet because of the appearance of the microblogging social network Twitter and because Google finally bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars, now acting as one of its subsidiaries.
The beginning of the Facebook era
Although it was created in 2004, Facebook did not have its great boom until 2007, when it could be translated into many languages, thus reaching countries around the world. Although social networks began solely as a social model, over the years social networks have acquired a lot of relevance in the field of marketing. Large companies were observing the great relevance they were acquiring and saw the possibility of business in marketing on social networks.
Facebook, which has 2,740 million users , developed its Facebook Ads advertising system, among others, Google created its advertising and analysis tools and then all social networks incorporated advertising into their interface.
And many more social networks with millions of users around the world
Over time, a multitude of new social networks appeared : some were not successful, such as Google+. Others had it, but in an ephemeral way, like Snapchat. Some more recent ones are already among the favorites of social media users, such as TikTok , Telegram or Twitch. And, of course, there are also those that are not well known worldwide, but dominate in their countries of origin, like Odnoklassniki in Russia, for example.
Millions of users around the world access social networks every day, in a ranking led by Facebook, with 11.8% more users than the previous year. For its part, YouTube remains in second place with 2,291 million users, 14.5% more.
WhatsApp , the great Facebook instant messaging platform, is in third place among the social networks with the most users in the world: no less than 2 billion people , while Facebook's other messaging platform, Messenger, is in the fourth position with 1,300 million, and Instagram, which has 1,220 million users, closes the list of Facebook platforms that star in the 10 with the most users in the world.
But not all the social media ecosystem focuses on Facebook: TikTok has quickly appeared on the big picture with 690 million monthly active users and this has caused Twitter, which has historically been one of the main social networks in the world, to go down. up to 16th place with 353 million users .
The pandemic drove the use of social networks to break the milestone in its history: in 2021 the report shows us that the penetration of social networks has exceeded half the population for the first time , with a total of 53.6% of the people in the world, that is to say 4.2 billion.
Companies were also incorporating social networks as a business mode, but the system was increasingly difficult to handle, so they needed the creation of new specialists, the figures of Community and Social media manager, among others, being born. A sector that has seen the birth of unsuspected references, such as the case of Desatranques Jaén in Spain, and that continues to evolve every day.
In parallel, influencers have emerged as the true stars of social media: in recent years, more and more creators, and more diverse, gather millions of followers on their Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Twitch accounts to follow their texts, images, videos or streams. A perfect environment for brands to get their messages to the final audience that has generated new terms such as streamer, instagramer or youtuber .
History of the Internet: the rise of ecommerce
With the creation of the first iPhone created by the Apple brand in 2007, which facilitated access to the internet from a mobile device like never before and the appearance of new technologies, electronic commerce was gaining more and more relevance and more and more companies were expanding. your business your towards digital commerce.
"There will be two types of businesses in the 21st century: those that are on the Internet and those that no longer exist" ( Bill Gates, creator of Microsoft ).
It is worth highlighting the example of Amazon , currently one of the most powerful eCommerce in the world: founded by Jeff Bezos, it began as an electronic bookstore in 1997 in the garage of his home in Seattle and with part of the capital donated by the Bezos family, has become one of the most powerful online stores in the world and with Jeff Bezos' dream fulfilled: "To become the store of everything." Amazon's revenue during 2019 reached 316,000 million euros, thanks to its online sales, commissions received from the sales of its marketplace sellers, advertising revenue, Prime subscriptions and even cloud hosting services through from AWS.
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