Many of us take the Internet for granted. This wasn’t the case when I first connected with my 300 bits per second modem to what was then just a shadow of the Internet we have today. This was early in the 1970s and getting onto the Internet and actually downloading something was really a hit or miss project. Today we can download a video in a few seconds, but back in the early days of the commercial Internet we wouldn’t even have attempted to download a video. Simple software programs took all night and often times something would go wrong. They took so long to download you would go to sleep then would wake up in the morning and check the computer to see if we you got the program you wanted. There were a few copy programs around if someone wanted to copy from a floppy disk, but they were excruciatingly slow. One which comes to mind was called Canada. It would take hours and would often fail, due to simple protection methods on the floppy it was copying. To give you an idea of how a disk might have been protected I will tell you about one game called Airport. The protection method for this game was merely making the directory invisible. That type of thing wouldn’t stop anybody who knew what they were doing today.

So where did the Internet come from? Did it just explode on the scene or did it evolve from something else? In the 1960s the United States government was working on a way secure communications could be accomplished between computers. They eventually developed something known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. This is often called ARPANET. The project was funded by the United States Department of Defense. Eventually this became the basis for our Internet today. When the commercial Internet came into being it was very crude. If we look at the Internet today and what it was like originally, it would be like comparing the model T Ford to a Tesla. You had to have a lot of patience for everything you wanted to do in those early days. Interestingly enough, there didn’t seem to be the amount of crime on the Internet we have today. I think one of the reasons for this was there was far less people on the Internet and probably most of them at the time were more or less law abiding people. As the Internet grew a lot of people from very poor countries saw it as a means of making easy money from what they considered rich people and career criminals saw it as easy pickings.

There certainly were not as many viruses around and it was common to find people who ran their computers without antivirus software. Slowly this changed until we had a flood of malware and not only were home computers being attacked, but websites themselves were being taken down. The attackers had learned they could perform what is known as a denial of service attack on a website. This means they could flood the website with data and it would collapse because it could not handle so many requests. This method is still being used to this day, but owners of big commercial websites have a lot more sophisticated defenses available to them. Still there are times when these defenses are not enough. To make things even worse government makes demands that some devices they claim not to be able to get into should have what is known as a back door built into them. A back door is just a portal into the software allowing one to take control. The creators of these devices such as Apple and others don’t want to do this, because it will make it easier for others to steal the data in these devices.

Engineers and scientists have been monitoring the Internet and they have noticed an alarming trend. It seems someone or some organization has been probing websites to discover their weakest points and what it will take to make them crash. They flood the website and keep increasing the pressure, then they stop and disappear. They come back later and pick up where they left off. This has been going on for months now and it is believed it is beyond the ability of individual computer hackers to do this. This only leaves very large organizations and is felt it is being done by a country. One of the problems with trying to trace who is doing this is they can disguise themselves as someone else. In other words if country A has decided to do this, they can make themselves seem to be country B. This makes it very tricky for anyone to be able to place the blame squarely on who is doing this. Experts are saying it doesn’t seem to be a typical criminal activity, because there is nothing to gain by crashing website. They further state perhaps some country is trying to figure out how to bring the entire Internet down and not just one or two websites.

I have read a lot on this subject and the consensus opinion seems to me United States has the biggest unit operation in the world and it is run by the National Security Agency also known as the NSA. The experts believe this agency probably knows who is doing this, but unless something happens they will not release their information. I think this is probably true, because several countries are performing different types of espionage over the Internet, including us. Let’s not forget we sent the viruses over the Internet which closed down some of the Iranian nuclear facilities for a while. The virus was designed in such a way it had no effect on the hundreds of millions of home computers and was specific to certain situations in Iranian nuclear plants.

When we watch a video or download a program from a website, we should realize how incredibly easy this type of computing has gotten for us. The social networks which have come into existence would not have been able to exist in the 1970s, because nobody could have made them powerful enough to support all those pictures, videos, messages and conversations. The first social network came into being in 1997 and was named Six Degrees. You could make a simple profile and make friends with other people. In 1999 blogging sites began to appear. It is believed the first email came about in 1965 and was called MAILBOX. It was used at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and someone would leave a note on person’s computer screen. It was a simple affair and nothing like we have today.

A lot of work has gone into the Internet since the early days and our computers and cell phones along with other devices have gotten a lot more powerful. If it wasn’t for the early pioneers none of these things would exist. Some of these companies are no longer with us, but their contributions were enormous. We shouldn’t forget their help in making things a lot easier for us.