The Internet: From Research Network to Everyday Life
A visualization of Internet connections. Wikimedia Commons.
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The Internet was not created by a single inventor on one dramatic day. It developed through decades of work by researchers, engineers and institutions. One important early network was ARPANET, funded by the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency. In 1969, computers at several American universities and research centres were connected. Early networks faced a major challenge: different computer systems needed reliable rules for communicating with one another. During the 1970s, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn helped develop the TCP/IP protocols, which became fundamental to Internet communication. ARPANET adopted TCP/IP in 1983, an important milestone in the growth of interconnected networks. The Internet and the World Wide Web are related but are not the same thing. The Internet is the global network infrastructure. The Web was created later by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN. Around 1989–1990, he proposed and developed technologies including web pages, hyperlinks and a system for locating information. The first website went online in 1991. During the 1990s, the Web expanded rapidly beyond universities and research organisations. Search engines, online shopping, email, social media, streaming and cloud services later changed how billions of people communicate and work. The Internet's history is therefore less a story of one invention than of many systems gradually connecting to create something much larger.
