Summary
Highlights
In 1969, the internet started with four computers and grew to over 20,000 by 1987, but it was restricted to universities and corporations for specific research and collaboration. In the 1970s, private networks like CompuServe and Micronet offered limited public access for emails, weather, games, and even online newspapers, but they were isolated and not connected to the main internet due to a ban on commercial traffic on the government-funded ARPANET.
ARPANET administrators sought to hand off internet responsibility, transitioning to NSFNET, which rapidly grew after connecting to ARPANET. In 1990, NSFNET replaced ARPANET as the internet's backbone. Although NSFNET initially banned commercial traffic, it began connecting private networks' email servers in 1988, leading to the first commercial emails in 1989. The first Internet Service Providers (ISPs) emerged around 1989-1992, connecting users to local networks and the broader internet, with companies like "The World" often cited as early examples. By 1995, NSFNET shut down, handing internet management entirely to ISPs.
The internet in the early 1990s was significantly different, primarily due to its slow speed. Dial-up connections, which involved computers making phone calls through modems, translated digital signals to analog signals over landline phones. This method was inherently slow because phone lines were not designed to transmit the high-frequency signals needed for large amounts of data, limiting data transfer rates. Despite its slowness, dial-up was considered revolutionary at the time.
The internet, short for 'internetworking,' refers to the physical cables and computers forming a global network that allows communication between devices. It predates the World Wide Web by over a decade. Early internet programs organized information in hierarchical structures, making navigation cumbersome as the network grew. To find specific information, users had to navigate through many layers, a process that became increasingly difficult as the internet expanded.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, with Robert Cailliau, developed the World Wide Web to simplify information access. Berners-Lee's key innovation was to 'flatten' the internet's tree-like structure using hypertext, a concept from the 1960s that allowed direct links between documents. He applied this to create hyperlinks, connecting different web pages, which formed the basis of the World Wide Web. The web became publicly available in 1993, with addresses typically starting with 'http://www.' (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), marking a pivotal moment in the internet's development.
The introduction of the World Wide Web spurred the creation of early web browsers like Netscape Navigator (1994), which allowed users to access and interpret these new hyperlinked pages. With the internet and web publicly accessible, internet usage exploded in the 1990s, attracting billions in investments into dot-com startups. However, this led to the dot-com bubble, which burst around the turn of the millennium, causing many startups to fail, but also paving the way for today's internet giants like Google and Facebook.