DEVELOPMENT OF WEB APPLICATIONS Authors: Carles Mateu Official Master in Free and Open Source Software Technology Open University of Catalonia

Course Description

Internet, the network of networks, emerged in the mid-1970s under the auspices of DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA launched a programme to research techniques and technologies that could bring together diverse packet switching networks allowing the computers connected to these networks to communicate with one another easily and openly.

Through these projects, a data communication protocol came into being – the IP or Internet protocol, which allowed several computers to communicate with one another on a network – the Internet – formed by the interconnection of diverse networks.

In the mid-1980s, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) set up a network called NSFNET, which became the Internet backbone together with similar networks created by NANSA (NSINet) and USDoE (the US Department of Energy) with ESNET. Most European countries had national backbones (NORDUNET, RedIRIS, SWITCH, etc.) and there were several pan-European initiatives (EARN and RARE). It was around this time that the first private Internet access providers, offering paid Internet access, emerged.

From this time on, thanks in part to the availability of TCP/IP protocol packet implementations (formed by all Internet protocols and not only by TCP and IP), some of which were already open source, Internet began to experience what would later become one of its main features, an exponential growth rate, which lasted until mid-2002, when the rate of growth began to falter slightly.