Back in Time: The Beginning

It's been more than fifty years since the very first inception of what we nowadays know as the Internet - the so-called ARPANET. In the beginning, this was a very simple yet revolutionary idea: To connect computers that reside in different locations using some kind of network technology - and looking back, this simple idea triggered one of the largest technological advancements humankind has brought to live: the Internet. To imagine a world without Internet is barely possible anymore. This technology is nowadays not only powering what you are currently reading (e.g. the webpages your browser displays), but also services that seem less apparent like:

• CDNs (Content Delivery Networks): These are networks delivering multi media content latency-free to users all over the world - think Netflix, Spotify or YouTube.
• Geolocation Services: Without these, we would be pretty much lost - these services provide GPS coordinates to locate devices - think Google Maps or smart home systems.
• SMTP/IMAP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Internet Message Access Protocol): used to receive e-mails on all of your devices.

But the road was not as straight-forward as it may seem - let' go back to the late 60s: The Beatles were still a thing, mankind landed on the moon using the processing power of a very basic calculator and communication was still very much analogue (think of those telephones where you needed to spin some big clunky dial in order to phone someone). The previously introduced ARPANET was created by the United States Department of Defense to interlink computers, enabling sharing of files, faster computation and redundancy (this seems somewhat familiar compared with what we do today, doesn't it?). Even though this initial network was rather small, it proved that it was indeed possible to build a network of computers that are not necessarily at the same location - all while enabling these computers to understand each other!

ARPANET access points in the 1970s by Semaforo GMS is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Really not that large, huh? What is apparent is the fact that this very early implementation of interconnected servers did not yet need any kind of real programming to work - after all, it was only about linking the associated computers to enable quick and easy sharing of files (more or less).