The public internet came along after four decades of television dominance and decades of private internet use and development. It came along after hundreds of years of inventive thinking and groundbreaking theorizing, and it built on every bit of human intelligence that had come before. The key innovators were dozens of scientists whose work covers decades; the entrepreneurs were thousands of political leaders, policy wonks, technology administrators, government and commercial contractors, and even grassroots organizers
In the early 1960s, J.C.R. Licklider (pictured above), Leonard Kleinrock, Donald Davies, Paul Baran, Lawrence Roberts and other research scientists came up with the ideas that allowed them to individually dream of and eventually come together to create a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly and easily access data and programs from any site.
The first group of networked computers communicated with each other in 1969, and ARPANET, or the Advanced Projects Research Agency Network became the start of the internet. Four U.S. universities were connected and became a research system by which computer scientists began solving problems and building the potential for worldwide, online connectivity. ARPANET had its first public demonstration in 1972, and in this same year the first e-mail program was written by Ray Tomlinson. By 1973, a majority of the internet use was for e-mail discussion.
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn came up with a streamlined networking standard - internet Protocol or IP - in the late 1970s. At the time, there were still only 188 host computers on the network, but IP brought new growth in the next few years. In 1984, a domain-name service was created, allowing the organization and classification of the world's online sites. This address system is still in use today; for example, .com, .org, .edu. More have since been added.
In 1991, the World Wide Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee (pictured at left) as a way for people to share information. The hyper-text format available through his Web made the internet much easier to use because all documents could be seen easily on-screen without downloading. The first "browser" software - Mosaic - was introduced by Marc Andreessen in 1993, and it enabled more fluid use of images and graphics online and opened up a new world for internet users.
In 1996, there were approximately 45 million people using the Internet. By 1999, the number of worldwide Internet users reached 150 million, and more than half of them were from the United States. In 2000, there were 407 million users worldwide. By 2004, there were between 600 and 800 million users (counting has become more and more inexact as the network has grown, and estimates vary).
The internet is a work in progress. While IP version 6 is now ready for implementation, some scientists - led by internet pioneer David Clark and others - are working toward a complete reinvention of the worldwide internet, starting from scratch. The project is expected to develop over the next decade.
In the early 1960s, J.C.R. Licklider (pictured above), Leonard Kleinrock, Donald Davies, Paul Baran, Lawrence Roberts and other research scientists came up with the ideas that allowed them to individually dream of and eventually come together to create a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly and easily access data and programs from any site.
The first group of networked computers communicated with each other in 1969, and ARPANET, or the Advanced Projects Research Agency Network became the start of the internet. Four U.S. universities were connected and became a research system by which computer scientists began solving problems and building the potential for worldwide, online connectivity. ARPANET had its first public demonstration in 1972, and in this same year the first e-mail program was written by Ray Tomlinson. By 1973, a majority of the internet use was for e-mail discussion.
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn came up with a streamlined networking standard - internet Protocol or IP - in the late 1970s. At the time, there were still only 188 host computers on the network, but IP brought new growth in the next few years. In 1984, a domain-name service was created, allowing the organization and classification of the world's online sites. This address system is still in use today; for example, .com, .org, .edu. More have since been added.
In 1991, the World Wide Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee (pictured at left) as a way for people to share information. The hyper-text format available through his Web made the internet much easier to use because all documents could be seen easily on-screen without downloading. The first "browser" software - Mosaic - was introduced by Marc Andreessen in 1993, and it enabled more fluid use of images and graphics online and opened up a new world for internet users.
In 1996, there were approximately 45 million people using the Internet. By 1999, the number of worldwide Internet users reached 150 million, and more than half of them were from the United States. In 2000, there were 407 million users worldwide. By 2004, there were between 600 and 800 million users (counting has become more and more inexact as the network has grown, and estimates vary).
The internet is a work in progress. While IP version 6 is now ready for implementation, some scientists - led by internet pioneer David Clark and others - are working toward a complete reinvention of the worldwide internet, starting from scratch. The project is expected to develop over the next decade.
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