MAP - Internet History - Origin to Commercial Use

The Internet and its History

The Internet is a huge worldwide reservoir of information that is made accessible to anyone across the world through the use of computers and high speed interconnected data links. This information may be shared and exchanged publicly or privately. The primary benefit of the Internet its ease in making this information and this vast communication network economically available to virtually everyone (currently estimated at 45 million users).

The Internet has only recently begun carrying unrestricted commercial traffic. Its initial purpose was to provide a method of rapid information exchange for research, education and defense purposes. A brief history of the Internet development is indicated below:

Late 60s & Early 70s - Government funding through U. S. Advanced Research Projects Agency created "ARPNET" to develop a communications network for research & military R&D.
1980-1983 - ARPNET interconnected all of the major research and educational networks by establishing a common communications protocol. This network is know today as the "Backbone" of the Internet.
Mid 80s - The National Science Foundation established several supercomputers centers for education and research purposes. They also added significantly to the network "backbone". Limited Commercial traffic was first allowed on the Internet.
1989 to 1991 - Tim Berners-Lee of CERN (a physics particle accelerator laboratory) in Geneva began to develop a simpler method to transfer information. The group developed the concept of hyperlinks within documents to quickly access related information. The project was dubbed the "WWW Project" and is the basis for the HTML Language used in today's Net Browsers. The World Wide Web then is a method of accessing world wide information using these techniques innovated at CERN. We believe that the popularity and growth of the Internet is largely due to this development.
1993 - The National Science Foundation awarded five year agreements to three companies to manage this "Internet". Network Solutions, AT&T and General Atomics were contracted to jointly manage the Internet through an organization called InterNIC (Internal Network Information Center). There now are no restrictions placed on Internet access for commercial companies.
Today - Millions of people have access to the Internet and thousands of companies are already on the Internet along with the educational and research centers. The commercial sector has already surpassed all other groups for host sites and new uses for the Internet are continually being innovated and implemented.