History of the Internet

Unlike other inventions there is no one 'creator' of the internet, but instead a group of people who helped to develop the internet to what it is today. The start of the internet's history began with  the launch of the Soviet satellite 'Sputnik' in 1957 as it resulted in the USA setting up agencies, such as NASA and ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to create better space-age technology and eventually, the internet.
In 1962 a 'Galactic network' of computers was proposed and after research into packet switching, a way to send info in 'packets' or sections, work on the ARPANET began in the late 1960's. The first message was sent from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) to a computer at Stanford University in 1969. The system crashed after sending two letters of the message (just the word LOGIN).
By early 70's more and more computers had been added to ARPANET but new technology was needed to create a single worldwide 'internet' with many independent networks. Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn, both computer scientists solved this problem by developing a way for all computers to communicate with each other. TCP/IP became known as the 'protocol' for online communication and transformed the internet into a much larger global community.







IMB PC from 1981
http://www.maximumpc.com/personal-computers-1980s/

The internet remained a small platform in the 80's for mostly scientists to work on as the programming was not user friendly at all. This changed in 1991, which saw massive changes in how the internet was used. Firstly, the first user friendly interface was designed by the University of Minnesota called a 'gopher' after the school's mascot. The World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee who was a CERN scientist at the time, changed the internet from a place just to send files to a 'web of information'. This new technology was based on hypertext, which are links to other sites in text. The first user friendly web browser was called Mosaic (Later called Netscape) and was designed in the University of Minnesota in 1992. It was the most popular internet browser until Microsoft's Internet Explorer was developed and during this year the American Congress allowed the World Wide Web to be used for commercial purposes too.

Social media sites such as Myspace, Facebook, etc. were set up in the early 2000s and most have remained popular to today.

The internet is only a recent invention and what's amazing about is that it continues to change and develop all the time.