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What is known today as the Internet grew out of a computer network developed by the United States Department of Defense. In the mid-1960s the Department of Defense created the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which made it possible for computers at military installations around the world to communicate with each other.
In the 1970s, with the encouragement of the government, research universities began to get involved in the ARPANET. Protocols were developed to enable communication between different types of computers. The 1970s also saw the development of e-mail and Telnet software. The Internet as we now know it emerged in the 1980s. During this decade, engineers developed a communications protocol known as TCP/IP, which allowed intercommunication between different types of computers on different networks. On January 1, 1983, the ARPANET and several other computer networks changed to the TCP/IP standard, giving birth to the Internet. All these networks were now unified by a universal language. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the European Lab for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland created the World Wide Web. Major developments in the Internet occurred in the 1990s. In 1991 Gopher was created at the University of Minnesota. Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser software, was introduced by Marc Andreesen and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana in 1993. Commercially available Web browsers soon followed: Netscape Navigator in 1994 and Microsoft Internet Explorer in 1995. |