History of the Internet

It is hard to imagine at time when the Internet was not available, but it is really not very old. The history of the Internet is not very old. In its infancy, it began as an experiment by the U.S. Department of Defense in the late Sixties. Fear of a nuclear holocaust was a worry of the Department of Defense and they wanted to have some way to stay in touch in case of a disaster. Out of this experiment, ARPANET, a network of scientific and academic sites, was born and is seen as the earliest part of the Internet. In the early days, the Internet only consisted of basic services like email, file transfers and logging into remote computers.

NSFNET was created in 1985 and changed the history of the Internet. NSFNET was series of networks between research institutes and educational sites. It created the backbone of the Internet and it was with this creation that users began to understand exactly what the Internet was capable of doing in terms of communication. As regional networks were connected, the number of Internet users began to grow. Corporations in addition to academic and scientific sites began to build their own networks. The National Science Foundation (NSF), through a service called InterNIC, started registering all Internet addresses to help improve routing.

The Internet grew as nothing before. More and more services were in demand and by 1987, the number of network hosts broke 10,000 and only two years later, in 1989, it broke 100,000. Once the World Wide Web was offered as an online service, the history of the Internet would change as never before. The World Wide Web grew at a rate of 341,634% in 1993, its third year in existence.

The history of the Internet is not long, but has had a great impact on almost everyone’s life worldwide. Today, it is hard for people to imagine life without the Internet. From meeting online friends, to researching genealogy, to balancing your checkbook, keeping in touch with family or listening to the latest music, the Internet opened a whole new world for many.