The Netcenter's

Brief History of the Internet

The Internet started out around 1975. At that time it was fairly experimental (but then so were personal computers). If you had an account on a large government computer or a university computer, you could, in a rather crude fashion, connect other computers via a network and share information. It was generally slow and wasn't at all graphical. The World Wide Web didn't exist. Actually, a number of the "features" of today's Internet didn't exist.

Designed as a deterrent to World War Three, the Internet really started to catch on in the early 1980s. People who used the Internet were still mostly academics (including students) and government types. It was popular for its e-mail, news groups, and file transfer capabilities. There was little, if any, commercial activity. It was funded by the Pentagon for national security. If a nuclear attack had come, the computer network was so designed that information could still flow around the country even if half the network were destroyed. This was the beginning of Arpanet, the first part of the Internet. It's ironic that we owe the commercialization of the Internet to the fall of the Soviet Union, because after the major nuclear war threat was gone, the government did not reallly need it any more.

Then, a few years ago, some people at the European Particle Physics Laboratory were looking for a way to share information. The result was the World Wide Web (or WWW, sometimes called W3). No one there envisioned what we have today. With the WWW, the Internet became graphical. You could point and click to do things. You could see graphics, and photos. A web page could have sound or animation attached to it.

In short, the Internet became cool. The media discovered there was something new and novel to talk about, and the rest you now know. Businesses started connected their local area networks in order to make their companies more competitive and to increase productivity. And today, there are about 50 million people using the Internet around the world, and several hundred thousand signing up to use it EVERY DAY! It's the fastest growing area of the economy. It's the fastest growing human endeavor in history. It's growing even faster than the early growth of telephones.

Some interesting statistics that may not mean much to you now, but may as you spend more time on the "net":

the majority of Internet users are between the ages of 20 and 40
there are estimated to be more than 60 million Web pages which takes up more than 6 terabytes of hard disk space
the most often used "services" are the WWW, e-mail, usenet news, and ftp
there are about 50,000 different news groups
many large companies are setting up their own "internal" Internet (these are called Intranets).

So, who owns the Internet, you ask. Well, no one does. That's one of the cool things. The Internet is made up of a more or less unmoderated group of people with computers who want to share information. In case you think your access provider owns a piece of the Internet. They don't. They control access to the Internet, but they don't own or control the Internet. They are like a gatekeeper - they let you in, they let you out, but they don't own the bridge. The phone companies own the wires, and other major companies own or rent the switches. No one owns it all.