Internet History

Although the Internet has been around in some form since the sixties, the commercial development of the Internet is much more recent.

During the mid 1960s the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Association began work on the ability to share super computers. This research was to develop a cooperative network of computers. Its goal was to allow scientists to share data.

Initially, four computers were connected to exchange information long distance. In the early 1970s the services offered were limited, such as file transfers and remote printing. Surprisingly e-mail was not one of the initial offerings.

The project, called ARPANET quickly expanded to a network of 15 despite its hefty membership fee of a quarter-million dollars per year. In 1974, the first commercial version of the ARPANET was introduced called TELNET. In 1975, ARPANET was officially taken over as the Defense Data Network program.

Commercial services then flourished. Even Queen Elizabeth was online with the first royal e-mail message in 1976. However, communication problems mounted. With no standard, errors were common and few computers could successfully talk with each other. To alleviate the problem a standard communication call Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was developed … and in 1983 the Internet was born.

Various computers on different networks could now talk to each other. Researchers through the world were able to share information and use distant resources. Thousands of discussion groups sprang up through electronic mail.

Things haven't been quite the same since.

By 1990, many metropolitan area residents owned a computer, modem, and telephone. We were now using Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to get on-line. But, this fast growth of the Internet resulted in an overgrown information jungle with no signposts or maps.

So, in the early 1990s tools were created to locate and index information. These allowed for the organization of data into menus where users could view data and make selections.
It was in Switzerland that the most common term of today came about. The ability to combine words, picture and sounds was achieved and dubbed the World Wide Web. The WWW took advantage of a concept called hypertext that allows names and pointers to be inserted. Soon advancements were made and the first 'Browser' called Mosaic was created that allowed retrieval of documents with a single mouse click.

By 1995 Internet Browsers made the Web and the Internet more accessible. We could now do almost everything we wanted to on the Internet and nothing around the house.

Today, many people telecommute using the Internet as a solution to clogged highways. Schools use it as a vast electronic library and new way of teaching. Video conferencing, chat rooms and e-mail keep our families in touch.

Things just aren't what they used to be.