HISTORY
The fore runner to the Internet was the Arpanet. This was an experimental network sponsored by the Pentagon. It was brought on line in 1969. Four host computers were connected together at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah.
If we go back to 1962 it was JCR Licklider of MIR who first proposed a global network of computers. He became the first head of computer research program at DARPA (Defence Advance Research Projects Agency). Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first book on packet switching theory in 1964, this was the basis of Internet connections. The RAND group under Paul Baran also wrote a paper on packet switching networks for the military in 1964.
The principles were simple. All the nodes would be equal in status to all other nodes. The messages would be divided into packets each packet separately addressed. Each packet would wind its way through the network on an individual basis. The Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack.
By 1971 there were 15 nodes in Arpanet and 1972 there were 37 nodes. The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers and scientists. In March 1972 Ray Tomlinson of BBN adapted E-mail for Arpanet. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his telnet to link the user name and address. The Arpanet was using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This allowed communication between hosts running on the same network.
In 1973 development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP. It was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other. A key concept of the Internet is that it was not designed for just one application, but as a general infrastructure on which new application could be conceived as illustrated by the emergence of the World Wide Web. It is the general purpose nature of the service provided by TCP/IP that makes this possible. It was not until 1983 that TCP/IP became the core Internet Protocol and replaced NCP entirely.
By 1983 Arpanet was being used by a number of defence research and development and operational organisation and so it split into two networks Milner and Arpanet. Milnet to serve the needs of the military and Arpanet to support the advanced research component. In 1986 the National Science Foundation created NSFNET. The new NSFNET set a very fast pace for technical advancement linking newer, faster super computers through faster links upgrading and expanding again and again. Arpanet itself expired in 1990, its users scarcely noticed.
The use of TCP/IP standard for computer networking is now global. The Internet Society was formed in 1991 by Kahns Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). The first prototype of the WWW server was built in 1991 by Robert Cailliou and Tim Berners-Lee and developed by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics or (CERN).
This protocol was based on hypertext. A system of embedding links in text to link to other text. The development of a graphical browser called Mosaic by Marc Andreessen gave the protocol its big boost. Later Andreessen moved to become the brains behind Netscape Corp. which produced the most successful graphical type of browser and served until Microsoft released it Microsoft Internet Explorer.