Internet tutorial

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Draft

Introduction

Learning goals

• Learn about Internet infrastructure and its major components

Prerequisites

• None

Moving on

• Www and http tutorial
• See web technology tutorials

Level and target population

• Anyone who is interested by want "Internet" means

Remarks

• This is just "know that" tutorial. It should help people to be able to distinguish between service and intfrastructure layers.

“The Internet is a standardized, global system of interconnected computer networks that connects millions of people. The system uses the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) standard rules for data representation, signaling, authentication, and error detection. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and other technologies. The Internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail, in addition to popular services such as video on demand, online shopping, online gaming, exchange of information from one-to-many or many-to-many by online chat, online social networking, online publishing, file transfer, file sharing and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or teleconferencing, telepresence person-to-person communication via voice and video.” (Wikipedia retrieved 12:41, 27 August 2009 (UTC)).

Often people confuse the Internet with the World-wide web. The Internet is a global hardware and software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is just one of the services communicated via the Internet, i.e. the collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.

A short history of Internet

Internet is now almost 40 years old. “The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation spawned worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and led to the commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s,...” (Wikipedia retrieved 12:41, 27 August 2009 (UTC))

The sixties - networking architecture

Licklider (1960) wrote "Man-Computer Symbiosis": “Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership. The main aims are 1) to let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and 2) to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs.”

• 1962: Invention of modern networking architecture (packets): A message can be broken down into packets like: sender - receiver - message

• 1969: first trial of Arpanet (future Internet)

In December 1969, the first version of Arpanet (Internet) went online. It connected four computers from four universities (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). The project leader was Bob Kahn from BBN (Cambridge,MA).

• Telnet (TELecommunication NETwork): Remote connection to another computer over a internet-like network. Telnet (as well as more modern secure versions) is still being used to remotly log into servers. In addition, HTTP (the web protocol) is just a modified telnet.

The seventies

Mail, forums, file transfer, remote connection services and the first Interprotols

• 1971 First verions of the File transfer protocol ( FTP), revised in 1980 and 1985. Still popular (but consider using SFTP or SCP instead, since FTP is inherently insecure).

• In 1972 Ray Tomlinson (BBN) created the first e-mail program

• 1973: TCP, Transmission Control Protocol: According to Vint Cerf's FAQ: “ During 1973, we developed the concepts underlying the Internet and prepared a preliminary paper in September of that year that we presented to the International Network Working Group (INWG). In December 1974 the first full draft of TCP was produced.”

• 1978: TCP/IP Protocol - Addition of IP, the Internet Protocol: TCP/IP, the main technical pillar of Internet emerged in mid-late 1978 in nearly final form and was finalized in 1991. “The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implements the protocol stack on which the Internet and many commercial networks run. It is part of the TCP/IP protocol suite, which is named after two of the most important protocols in it: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), which were also the first two networking protocols defined.

The 80’s - coexistence of several different networks

• UseNet (Unix), BitNet (DEC/IBM), BBS (dial-up servers ran from home), etc.

The nineties - emergence of the web as the dominant Internet service

• 1991 Gopher: The University of Minnesota developed gopher named after a mascot but also means "go fer". Gopher was a user-friendly server that allowed administrators to build menus to access local or remote files and services (e.g. phone directories, library interfaces).

• 1992: Tim Berners-Lee et al. at CERN invented the WWW, the World-Wide Web - an Internet service that relies on HTTP and HTML

• 1995: The World discovers the WWW. Internet goes commercial. Also, Microsoft enters the game.

• 1998 XML a simply, but fairly unversal markup langue was defined. Soon after, the first XML-based networking application standards emerged (e.g. SOAP and XML-RPC). Today, there exists hundreds of XML "languages", including a few dozen major ones like XHTML.

• 2007: 500 million connected computers, hundreds of protocols and services

An overview of the Internet architecture

Internet is complex Infrastructure of harware and software. “The responsibility for the architectural design of the Internet software systems has been delegated to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).[8] The IETF conducts standard-setting work groups, open to any individual, about the various aspects of Internet architecture. Resulting discussions and final standards are published in a series of publications each of which is called a Request for Comment (RFC), freely available on the IETF web site. The principal methods of networking that enable the Internet are contained in specially designated RFCs that constitute the Internet Standards.” (Wikipedia, retrieved 12:41, 27 August 2009 (UTC))