Introduction

Imagine a world without the internet. It’s hard, isn’t it?

But the internet we know and love wasn’t created with the intention of connecting billions of people around the world. Its roots are far more humble than you might expect.

ARPANET

It all started back in 1969 with ARPANET, a network linking four research university research centers in California and Utah. The network was funded by the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, when the US military was heavily focused on the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The original goal of the research project was to build network communication systems that could continue to operate during a nuclear war.

While it may have started with a military focus, it didn’t take long for the academics using ARPANET to start making changes to the system that would better suit the wider scientific and research communities. More computers were added to expand ARPANET during the 1970s, and in 1972 the first email program was created, quickly becoming the most popular application on the network.

In the late 1980s, the first commercial ISPs (Internet Service Providers) could connect to the networks that had evolved from the ARPANET project. But the experience was still extremely basic, with users limited to tools like email, FTP (_file transfer protocol, _used to send and receive files) or USENET (an early group discussion system), which were functional but difficult for non-experts to set up and use.

World Wide Web (WWW)

Everything changed in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee, an English scientist at CERN, created the World Wide Web (WWW).

The World Wide Web is a hypertext document system, a technical way of describing a collection of connected documents using clickable hyperlinks (the links you click on a website). You can think of the web as sitting on top of the internet, using the network as “plumbing pipes” to send data for the documents, or web pages, worldwide.