Once it was a fantasy to communicate with a person on the other side of the world, and now we are closer to each other than never before. Communication is an essential part of every aspect of our lives, and without it, the world would spin in silence. The need for constant communication and sharing information has created the urge for humanity to come up with a solution. In simple terms, what we needed was a communication network which will lessen the contact between people in different location of the world and devices.
Communication network
It is a network of a group of devices comprising hardware and software together, whether in the same geographical location or globally to facilitate communication and information sharing. The right purpose of the computers came to the surface when people invented the Internet. The story of the Internet can be traced back to the 1950s. Long story short, the problem that appeared in the 1960s stimulated people to think about connecting the computer devices into one network where they will be able to share information and communicate even though in different locations. Computers couldn’t communicate with each other. And in 1969, the first communication network appeared in the USA and it was called ARPANET (The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which is a predecessor to the modern Internet.
The network and the problem
ARPANET grew over the next decade, while different organizations were connected to different networks, which created another problem. The networks couldn’t communicate between them. Each network had its own language, or protocol (a set of rules that allow two devices or more, to send information back and forth).
The solution
And like any other problem, this one was solved too. It was solved with the invention of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol). This intermediary protocol connected the existing ones of the different networks and provided communication between them. And here in the first breakthrough is where we first meet the term Internet, and it means ‘An Interconnected Network of Networks’.
