The need for the Internet arose from two things: universities wanted to be able to exchange information freely and the military was concerned about keeping their networks going in case of a major war. The history of the internet evolves around this research.
The development was initially driven by the universities. They started to develop protocols to make it easier to exchange information more readily between their computer systems. The military soon realized the potential of all this and started taking part in the research.
These initial primitive networks were only used by computer geeks and scientists. It was not open to the general public, but only to members of the particular university\’s staff or students that were give specific access. The whole concept evolved around file sharing.
One of these file sharing services was called FTP, which stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is still widely used on the Internet at this very moment. If you have a website, for example, you would use an FTP program to transfer the files from your personal computer to the web server.
The universities spent many thousands of hours on research during the \’eighties and \’nineties to work on a menu system, so anyone logging on to the network could easily get a list of available files they can access by typing the name of the file or selecting its name.
A major step forward was when the researchers at the European Laboratory for particle physics (popularly called CERN) developed the hypertext protocol, which enabled users to embed links in a page and enabled anyone to access the relevant document by simply clicking on the link. It was what lead to the creation of the World Wide Web in 1991 and is in fact the principle that still drives the web today.
The next huge step forward came with the introduction of the web browser. This suddenly enabled anyone logged on to the network to browse through thousands or millions of files by simply following hyperlinks on the different pages. Mosaic was the first graphical web browser and it was introduced during 1993. Others soon followed, including Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
The early web was not planned to be for commercial use. The scientists and researchers wanted it to be for the exchange of information between non profit networks only. They could not win the fight; the first commercial networks appeared on the scene during the \’90s and soon there were numerous private networks offering email accounts and web browsing. The history of the Internet is still unfolding at this very moment and we are privileged to be part of something that changed the world so profoundly.
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