Internet history

A computer-based communications system allowing users to communicate quickly without relying upon telephone communication. The enabling technology of the Internet, packet switching, was invented in the early 1960s, but it took 30 years for the first primitive computer networks to evolve into today’s ubiquitous information infrastructure.

Until the invention of packet switching, users could be connected to only one computer at a time, using a long-distance telephone line. This was expensive, because the telephone connection was used an average of only 2 percent of the time, and unreliable, because if the telephone connection failed communication ceased altogether. In packet switching, data was transmitted not by a dedicated communications line, but by converting it into “packets,” rather like telegrams, containing the address of the sender and recipient. A packet-switched network contained many communications lines interconnected by small, message-processing computers—now called routers—that directed the flow of packets in the network.

The pioneering packet-switched network was Arpanet, initially connecting just four “host” computers in 1969, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Development of the Arpanet was contracted out to a group of American universities, and this led to a uniquely democratic, occasionally anarchic, culture. By 1971, Arpanet had 23 computers attached to it. Originally, the network had been designed so that users could make use of specialized computers remote from their place of work. However, it turned out that the main use of the network was for electronic mail, something the designers had never envisioned.

In the period 1975–85, other computer networks sprang up around the world, usually based on some form of packet switching. Some of them were commercial networks, while others were private networks owned by governments or MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONs. The early 1980s also saw the development of on-line computer services such as CompuServe and America Online (AOL) for home computer users. The problem with these networks was that they could not communicate with each other. For example, users could e-mail only people within their own network, and could access only the information located on their particular network. However, in the late 1970s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency—the sponsor of Arpanet—began to addresss this problem, which it called inter-networking, or simply the Internet.

It devised a set of rules—known as a “protocol”—for communication between networks. This was the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or simply TCP/IP, a mysterious acronym familiar to most experienced users of the Internet. Gradually many of the world’s non-military networks began to connect with one another. Thus, the Internet is simply a network of computer networks, but it was a miracle of cooperation, each network adding to the telecommunications infrastructure piece-bypiece without payment from any centralized funding authority. By 1988, there were 50,000 host computers attached to the Internet. Three years later there were a million. The early 1990s saw the first commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which gave inexpensive commercial and domestic access to the Internet. The issue of the Internet became highly politicized in the Clinton-Gore election campaign in 1992, in which the candidates expressed the need to provide Internet access to all Americans, just as earlier generations had had access to the postal service and the telephone.

Increasingly, the Internet came to be viewed not as a computing and communications resource but as an information repository, but it was difficult to access this information unless one was a trained information researcher. In 1989, a young, British-born researcher at the CERN nuclear research laboratory in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee, invented a method of organizing information that he called the World Wide Web (WWW—or simply the Web). To view information on the Web, one would use a “browser” to view an on-line document, using navigation buttons and links to move within the document or to another document. The information itself, however, would be effectively disembodied in cyberspace—existing on computers here, there, and everywhere.

The World Wide Web liberated the Internet. In 1993, the primary users of the Internet had been academics and scientists; five years later, there were 130 million users around the world from all walks of life. The Internet became increasingly commercialized. One of the major commercial successes was the Netscape Corporation, whose Netscape Navigator browser, introduced in December 1994, did much to popularize the Internet. Other corporations such as Yahoo and Lycos were commercial spin-offs of “search engines” originally developed in universities to help locate information on the Web. In 1995, Microsoft introduced its Internet Explorer browser and the Microsoft Network (MSN), seeking to dominate the Internet as it had the personal computer. However, as the content of any one network was dwarfed by the riches of the Internet as a whole, full-service providers such as CompuServe, AOL, and MSN quickly changed their business model to become Internet Service Providers and mere “portals” to the World Wide Web.

By 1996, there were 10 million host computers on the Internet, a number that was doubling every 18 months. By 2000, there were more than 70 million. The Internet enabled a new commercial paradigm, based on the reduction of economic friction by eliminating middlemen and physical inventories. The best-known example was Amazon. com, the on-line bookstore established by Jim Bezos, a 30-year-old entrepreneur, in 1995; five years later it had more than 10 million customers. The Internet was a Klondike for so-called dot-com entrepreneurs, with hundreds and eventually thousands of new businesses being formed, such as travel agencies, “e-tailers,” stockbrokers, and on-line auctioneers. By 2000, all significant businesses, whether new economy or old economy, found it necessary to have a Web “presence.”

See also COMPUTER INDUSTRY; INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES.

Further reading

• Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. 
• Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. San Francisco: Harper, 1999. 

Martin Campbell-Kelly