Internet History

The internet began as ARPANET (1969, US Department of Defense) — a packet-switching network designed to survive nuclear attack by routing around damage. The first message transmitted (October 29, 1969, UCLA to Stanford Research Institute) was 'lo' — the system crashed after two letters of 'login'. Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web (1991, CERN) — adding hypertext links between documents — made the internet accessible to non-specialists and created the basis for everything we use today. Key milestones: email (1972); DNS (1983, giving websites readable names instead of numbers); Mosaic browser (1993, first graphical web browser); Amazon (1994); Google (1998); Wikipedia (2001); Facebook (2004); YouTube (2005); Twitter (2006); iPhone/app economy (2007); cloud computing (AWS 2006, Microsoft Azure 2010); streaming (Netflix 2007). The internet now connects 5.4 billion people — the largest human communication network ever created.