The internet began as two linked computers in California in 1969
On 29 October 1969, a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles was connected to one at the Stanford Research Institute. That two-node link was the first piece of ARPANET. By the end of 1971 it had grown to 15 sites, and its descendants now tie together networks across the globe.
The groundwork was laid in the 1960s. Computer scientists developed time-sharing, and J. C. R. Licklider imagined a universal network, first at Bolt Beranek and Newman and then at the US Defense Department's research agency. The key trick of splitting messages into small, independently routed chunks came from Paul Baran at RAND and, separately, Donald Davies at Britain's National Physical Laboratory. After a 1967 symposium, the NPL approach was built into ARPANET's design.
Joining different networks into one was the next puzzle. In 1974 Vint Cerf at Stanford and Bob Kahn at DARPA proposed a protocol for joining such networks together, and Cerf's team used internet as shorthand for internetwork. The word itself was older: internetted meant interwoven as early as 1849, and a 1945 War Department radio manual used Internet. The TCP/IP protocol suite was standardised in 1982, and in 1986 NSFNet opened supercomputer sites to researchers, first at 56 kilobits per second. In 1988 and 1989 the network reached Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, becoming truly intercontinental.
Commerce followed. Internet service providers appeared in the United States and Australia in 1989, MCI Mail and CompuServe connected that year to its half-million users, and ARPANET itself was retired in 1990. In March 1990 a fast link joined NSFNet to Europe between Cornell University and CERN. Later that year Tim Berners-Lee, after two years of lobbying CERN management, started writing the first web browser; by Christmas he had HTTP, HTML, a browser, a server and the first web pages. The web, though, is only one service riding on the internet, alongside email and many others.
No single body runs it. Each network sets its own rules, ICANN oversees addresses and domain names, and the non-profit IETF standardises the core protocols. Even the capital letter is contested; the AP Stylebook has recommended lowercase since 2016.
Source: Internet
