Blog #2 History of the Internet

         The Internet is something that our generation takes for granted because it’s something that we’ve had most of our lives.  Our technology has come a long way since computers used batch processing and indirect connections, and now we can talk to people across the world effortlessly.  While the notes Liz Ellcessor gave us in lecture started to get me to think about how amazing this is, this video made it easier to understand with the pictures and graphics that are shown throughout the video.  I'm not a technology expert, so a lot of this jargon gets lost when I read about the history, but this video made the information stick with me longer.

         I found it interesting how the fear of Sputnik during the Cold War in 1957 started the United States to come up with DARPA in 1958, which was one of the foundations of the Internet.  According to the video, before DARPA individuals had to share information through each other.  DARPA accelerated knowledge transfer and avoided doubling of up already existing research.  Later to be developed was ARAPANET and we got rid of the ARPANET in 1990 for the Internet!  The Internet has only been around for about 20 years! How did people live without being able to Wikipedia or Google any question that they had in their head for the answer?  Did people actually have to know how to read maps because they couldn’t Mapquest directions?   We take all of these luxuries of the internet for granted, but after watching the video on the history of the Internet, it really puts in perspective how amazing it is that we can do these sorts of things through the Internet. I am thankful that today we have the Internet, and this video really puts in perspective of how far computers and technology has come to make the Internet possible.