Internet
The successor to phone network
In the 70s of the 20th century, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, commissioned the creation of a computer communication network that could work with some nodes destroyed. In order to achieve this goal, a set of decentralized network protocols was designed, TCP / IP, which allows computers to communicate without central servers. This network was called ARPANET
During that same decade, the ATT company made an operating system created by two of its engineers, UNIX, available to the academic world. This system quickly became popular, and since it also had a communications protocol, the UUCP , it did not take long for communications networks based on this protocol to appear. Among the networks of this kind that emerged, we can highlight UUnet , in the United States, and EUnet , in Europe. Of these two networks I am not clear if they were born in a coordinated way, or if they appeared separately and later interconnected.
The last step was the adoption of TCP / IP as the standard Unix network protocol, which made it possible to interconnect UUCP networks with ARPANET, giving rise to what we now know as the Internet.
My first contact with the Internet was not in the university, but in a BBS, called SICYD (currently it no longer exists; it was absorbed by the company Fonocom SA ), which some friends set up. They wanted to offer e-mail over the Internet, and they asked me to set up the system for them. In order to connect to the network, they first had to register with USENIX , which at that time was the international association of Unix users (today it seems that they have reoriented their objectives), and which was the one that administered the UUnet and EUnet networks.
Actually, we don't connect the BBS to the Internet, but to EUnet; in particular, to the node EUnet had in Spain, which was a server located at the Faculty of Telecommunications of the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid , whose hostname was goya.dit.upm.es .
It wasn't long before the business Internet access service was privatized; thus, both EUnet and UUnet became private companies, the same as the access node in Madrid; which became the company Goya Servicios Telemáticos SA , a name that was a true tribute to its beginnings.
It is not clear to me if Goya was the first Internet access provider in Spain; the other candidate for this title is Encomix , a Zaragoza company that was also born as a BBS, but later became an ISP. I know that, at that time, Encomix offered e-mail, but I don't know if it sold full access (that is, TCP / IP), which Goya did offer.
In those early days, the Internet was nothing like what it is now. The only services the network offered were email, telnet, and ftp. The email was the same as we use now, with the difference that the messages could only contain text.
FTP is an application used to access file servers and send or receive files from those servers. This application is still used today, without any significant changes (apart from improvements in the user interfaces of the programs).
Telnet is an application that allows you to connect to a remote computer by simulating a terminal that was used to manage computers at that time. It did not take long for BBs accessible via telnet to appear on the Internet, identical to those accessed via modem, although with the boom in services that occurred in the 1990s, these BBs soon became obsolete and disappeared. Today, telnet, although still supported by most systems, has practically disappeared; Furthermore, its use is discouraged due to its multiple security problems.
The first step towards the Internet that we know today was marked by the appearance of IRC , the invention of a Finnish technician (I don't know the details of the story; IRC was invented in 1988 and my first contact with this program was in 1992). The first IRC program that I had the opportunity to use was ircII, a primitive program for Unix and VMS machines, which was used from text-mode terminals. Currently, the programs have improved a lot, but the IRC, internally, continues to work the same as then.
The next step was the creation of the Gopher; This application intended to create a global directory of files distributed among a large number of servers in which it was possible to carry out searches and traverses in a simple way; Does it ring a bell? Yes, the gopher was the predecessor of the World Wide Web . The Gohper had a very short life, because the web appeared shortly after and, obviously, it did not take long to replace it.
The WWW was born as a development of CERN to solve an internal problem; the need to organize your immense documentary database. The solution that was found was to develop a document creation language in which links could be inserted that pointed to other documents, which could be located on other machines. In other words, the web allowed the articulation of a network of distributed information, so that each set of documents could be maintained by different people.
My first contact with the WWW occurred in 1994, evidently, at the University, when I had the opportunity to test the Mosaic , first on a SUN workstation in the data center, and then on the PCs with Windows 3.11 that we had in the room. of computers. In any case, this program soon fell into oblivion, replaced by Netscape , a browser based on Mosaic, but much more advanced.
Over time, Goya will be absorbed by EUnet, which in turn will be absorbed by UUnet. Along the way, Servicom appeared ; This company became famous because it was responsible for all Spaniards learning that the Internet existed, and because it was the incubator where many of the future entrepreneurs in this sector were trained. Among the ISPs that can be considered children of Servicom (that is, they were created by people out of this company), are Intercom and Seker .
The rest of the story is already known; after the starting gun of Servicom, a large number of Internet access providers appeared, a boom that became even greater with the appearance of Infovia . After the privatization of Telefónica and the liberalization of the telephony sector meant the entry of new companies on the scene, but the price of telephone calls to connect to the Internet not only did not fall, but also rose, which put the Internet community on the warpath, starting a campaign of protests that would end with the creation of a flat telephone rate for the afternoon schedule (popularly known as "wavy rate"), and with the introduction of new connection technologies, such as ADSL or cable. They offer permanent Internet connection for a fixed monthly fee.