In today's digital age, we use the internet almost every day, but do you really understand it? With the continuous improvement of blockchain technology, the Internet has begun to transform into a decentralized Web3, and in the past half a century, the Internet has changed a lot.
The original Internet originated in the Soviet-American Cold War in the 1960s. At that time, the United States was worried that their communication system might be damaged. For the purpose of establishing a secure communication network, the United States developed the prototype of the first generation of the Internet— —ARPANET, which is a computer network that can use computers to complete long-distance communication conversations. On October 29, 1969, ARPANET successfully delivered the first message through two computers located at UCLA and Stanford University. By the end of 1969, ARPANET added two more computers. In this way, a small communication network is formed between the four computers.
In 1971, the first e-mail was born in the ARPANET, programmer Ray Tomlinson used the "@" symbol to separate the machine name from the user name, and this symbol is still used in today's e-mail system.
In 1974, the TCP/IP protocol at the bottom of the Internet was born. As a protocol that can work on any computer and operating system, it allows different computers or systems to transmit data through the Internet. The prototype of the modern Internet as we know it today was also truly formed because of the TCP/IP protocol.
In 1984, the Domain Name System (DNS) was born in the Internet, which allowed the originally very complicated computer IP addresses to be converted into simple and easy-to-remember domain names, which made it easier for people to access the Internet. Since then, the Internet has really ushered in An opportunity for rapid growth. By 1987, there were about 30,000 computers on the Internet.
In 1990, the code of the World Wide Web was born in the hands of Tim Berners-Lee, and the Internet officially entered a Web1 era that could realize the global Internet. At the same time, there were standards such as HTML, HTTP, and URL that we are familiar with today.
Subsequently, a series of Internet ecology based on the TCP/IP protocol and the World Wide Web as the framework appeared on the Internet, such as the content-based search protocol Gopher (hamster), the MOSAIC browser that provides Internet access for non-technical personnel, and since then, the Internet The industry ushered in a big explosion. In 1995, the Internet was opened for commercial operation. In the same year, Amazon, eBay and other Internet giants were also established.
By 1998, Google launched the Google search engine, which completely changed the way the Internet is used. Until today, various search engines are similar, and they all adopt the content retrieval method proposed by Google.
Wikipedia, which appeared in 2001, was considered unreliable by many at the time, but its success also proved that this will be an event worthy of the Internet's memory. It created an Internet development path of democratization and information integration, which provided a lot of inspiration for the later Internet model.
With the continuous increase of Internet users, the demand has also been continuously improved. Therefore, in 2004, a website model that allows users to interact with the Internet was created. Users can comment, publish content, and contact others on the Internet. From the Web1 era of one-way information provision to the Web2 era of two-way interaction, the user's network experience has been greatly improved.
Since then, a lot of content we are familiar with has gradually emerged. For example, YouTube appeared in 2005; Twitter was born in 2006; in 2007, Apple brought the most influential innovation in Web2, that is, the mobile Internet, which uses portable smart terminals to realize the mobility of the network.
The blockchain-related content proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto at the end of 2008 opened a door for Web3. In 2009, the first blockchain was officially established. Although the Internet at this time is still dominated by Web2, the seeds of Web3 have already been planted.
Subsequently, projects with blockchain technology as the core continued to innovate, and the ecology began to grow gradually. In 2015, the establishment of Ethereum expanded the blockchain from the original application scenario of digital currency to the ecology of more fields, and the business of Web3 also began to grow rapidly.
Various decentralized ecologies such as decentralized finance (DeFi), NFT, DAO, decentralized social networking, and DID have appeared on the Internet. Challenge the ecology that Web2 gradually forms a centralized monopoly.
From the current point of view, the era of Web2 has undeniably changed our lives, and it has also made us change more than ever in the past 20 years. But on the other hand, from Web1 to Web2, it is also a kind of capital-centralized aggregation, which has essentially deviated from the Internet's original goal of interconnection of all things, and Web3 is also based on this, and it is breaking Web2. various disadvantages of the Internet, thereby realizing the true potential of the Internet.