The History of ..THE INTERNET...

Big topic. One that will be hard to fully explain in a blog post.
So many people in this world access it today, and it's very easy to take it for granted.

I guess the question is, how did we get from this;

To this?

Well let's find out...

(This blog post will cover the formation and early days of the Internet.)

First off, we need to make a distinction between the Internet and the World Wide Web.
The Internet is a globally connected system of computers that serve their user's needs.
The World Wide Web is the service that runs on the Internet and holds all the resources that we access.
Got it? Good.

So how did the Internet come into this world? Well, it all started way back in the 1950's when the first computers were being pushed to their full potential. It had its humble beginnings with a simple message that was sent from the University of California to the Stanford Research Institute.

They were using an early version of something similar to the Internet called ARPANet, which was introduced around about 1970. It was a connected network of university and research computers. More and more institutes joined and saw the potential of this network. Eventually as other networks were being founded in various countries around the globe, they started to become increasingly interconnected.

In the 70s through to the 90s, things like e-mail, pc modems, spam, domain names and most of the basic ingredients of the Internet were invented during this time.

Then the World Wide Web was born.
The first proposal for a collective storage system for links, pictures and text came from Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, which was also the year that the first commercial internet service provider was launched. After that, the Internet started to become more and more accessible to the average user, with things like easy to use web browsers being implemented. Through the mid 90's to the beginning of the new millennium, things such as webmail, file sharing, better access, Google and Wikipedia were invented.

So I guess that's a fair blurb on how the early internet came to be. Currently we're dealing with internet privacy issues as our lives become increasingly interconnected with the internet amongst other things, so the future is definitely going to be interesting...





Image credits:

1 - http://photos.myjoyonline.com/photos/news/201211/370895532_532414.jpg

2 - http://www.joeydevilla.com/2010/07/10/bacon-space-kitty/