Blog #2: Thoughts on "History of the Internet"

Melih Bilgil's video “History of the Internet” reinforced many of the concepts from last week's lecture on ARPANET and the origins of the Internet. We have certainly come a long way from 1957 when computers only worked on one task at a time through batch processing to the Internet as we know it today. The diagrams in the clip were especially helpful in learning about the concept of packet switching and the move from a centralized to decentralized network to avoid any potential communication breakdowns in the event of an attack by Cuba. It is interesting to see how many different networks including the ARPANET and the RAND corporation in the United States, the National Physical Laboratory in England, and Cyclades in France, from all across the world came together to form the Internet. Rather than just a one person coming up with the concept, many people and institutions with many different ideas about its use (scientific, military, and commercial) are responsible for the foundations of the Internet. Before lecture and this video, although I use the internet everyday for several hours, I had absolutely no idea about how complicated the formation of our modern internet was.