Created by DARPA in the early 1970s,
WANs were intended to provide computer networks that could support high-throughput and distributed computing, information technology services, and information security. However, the development of these systems was hampered by the unavailability of operating systems that were compatible with the new computers, as well as by an aging, low performance computing infrastructure.
Since they were introduced, WANs have been developed to provide Internet connectivity for business and consumers worldwide, have become ubiquitous in many parts of the world, and are increasingly being used to provide real-time information services to public agencies, military operations, and other civilian and military users. WANs are also increasingly being used to provide interoperability between separate IT infrastructures. Today, wan networks cover a wide variety of applications ranging from the Web to mobile applications, security and privacy, embedded, electronic commerce, advertising, and media content delivery.
History of WANs
The Internet had its first major network under the name ARPANET that operated from 1978 through 1985. The Internet was supported by various major organizations including NASA, MIT, the National Science Foundation, AT&T, Bell Labs, and the University of California. Various research groups were also involved in the development of the Internet.
In 1987, the early World Wide Web became a reality. The Web is the worldwide (web) directory of information, with hyperlinks. A Web page can have numerous links to other Web pages and to text information on the Internet. Most Web pages contain a hyperlink to an area in which the page’s content is located.
The Internet has increased dramatically in user numbers since its inception, but the importance of the Internet to human knowledge and communication in general cannot be overstated. In the past few decades, the Internet has become the global platform for e-commerce, information retrieval, the production of legal documents, e-mail, worldwide phone calls, instant messaging, videoconferencing, online-education, medical diagnosis and treatment, and many other applications. The Internet has also provided the largest single platform for public-private collaboration of any endeavor that has ever been undertaken in the history of humanity. It is estimated that the WAN provides services equivalent to three large information superhighways, including the Internet.
The Internet at the time of its inception was not a WAN. It had no fixed network. In fact, it had no hardware network at all. This was due to its being an experimental technology. It was developed by the ARPANET consortium at Stanford University at a cost of approximately US$1 billion. There were no vendors or standard interfaces. Initially, the Internet was developed from static software called ARPANET that was to be distributed throughout the world. This process was later known as « portmapping » and involved essentially a map of network locations for each organization to map out its own WAN interfaces. As computers became more advanced and researchers uncovered the properties of certain chips that would allow them to connect to the Internet, the project was modified and now ran on commodity computers that had either a modem or a router in the chip.