History and Development

The Internet’s origins can be traced to a project sponsored by the U.S. Defense Department. Its purpose was to find a way to connect key military computers (such as those controlling air defense radar and interceptor systems). Such a system required a great deal of redundancy, routing communications around installations that had been destroyed by enemy nuclear weapons. The solution was to break data up into individually addressed packets that could be dispatched by routing software that could find whatever route to the destination was viable or most efficient. At the destination, packets would be reassembled into messages or data files.

By the early 1970s, a number of research institutions including the pioneer networking firm Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of California at Berkeley were connected to the government-funded and administered ARPANET (named for the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency). Gradually, as use of the ARPANET’s protocol spread, gateways were created to connect it to other networks such as the National Science Foundation’s NSFnet. The growth of the network was also spurred by the creation of useful applications including e-mail and Usenet, a sort of bulletin-board service. Meanwhile, a completely different world of online networking arose during the 1980s in the form of local bulletin boards, often connected using a store-and-forward system called FidoNet, and proprietary online services such as CompuServe and America On-line. At first there were few connections between these networks and the ARPANET, which had evolved into a general-purpose network for the academic community under the rubric of NSFnet. (It was possible to send e-mail between some networks using special gateways, but a number of different kinds of address syntax had to be used.)

In the 1990s, the NSFnet was essentially privatized, passing from government administration to a corporation that assigned domain names. However, the impetus that brought the Internet into the daily consciousness of more and more people was the development of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee at the European particle research laboratory, CERN. With a standard way to display and link text (and the addition of graphics and multimedia by the mid-1990s), the Web is the Internet as far as most users are concerned. What had been a network for academics and adventurous professionals became a mainstream medium by the end of the decade.