History of the Internet

The internet began once electronic computers were invented in the 1960's. It was started when the United States Defense Department developed ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency network) which was a network of computers designed to withstand partial outages during the Cold War and as a way for government researchers to share new findings and information. In the 1980's when desktop computers became more popular organizations wanted to link the local area networks (LANs)

to the ARPAnet. The idea was that if everyone could link the computers together through the internet and everyone would benefit. To make the connection of the computers more speedy the National Science Foundation (NSF) created 5 super computing centers in 1986. By 1990 ARPAnet had been replaced with NSFnet as more and more countries around the world used NSFnet.In 1991 the National Research and Education Network (NREN) was founded and the World Wide Web was released. At this time the internet was still mostly used by scientist but started to attract more of the common person with the addition of the World Wide Web. When Netscape was introduced in 1994 the interest and use of the World Wide Web took off. The internet today is the same as it was in 1994 but with much faster speeds and many more websites.

www.internetsociety.org