History of the Internet

The launching of Sputnik I in 1957 by the Soviet Union triggered US President Eisenhower to set up ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) in order to develop military science and technology and to regain the lead in the arms race. The research carried out at ARPA led to the birth of the idea of a countrywide communications network.

This research led to the development of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which went live in early October 1969. The first communications were between the University of California at Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute.

However, ARPANET did not interact well with other networks that did not share its own native protocol. This led to the development of the TCP/IP protocol by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, which could be layered over many different types of networks.

In August 1991, two years after he had developed the first few web pages at CERN in Switzerland, Oxford graduate Tim Berners-Lee launched his World Wide Web project. By late 1994, there was increasing public interest in this application, which had previously been limited to academic and technical use.

By 1996, the term 'Internet' was in household use, and now, over 10 years later, millions of people around the world have access, enabling them to surf the Web, send and receive e-mails and communicate with anyone in the world with the click of a mouse.