What initiated the development of the Internet in the first place was the need of universities to share information between their researchers and the fear of the military that a major attack will destroy their computer networks controlling satellites and other types of weapons. The history of the internet is closely linked to 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 early, quite primitive, networks were solely for the use of computer experts and scientists. It was not accessible to the man in the street, but only to staff members at the universities and selected advanced students. The whole idea centered around file sharing.

One such file sharing service was called FTP (File Transfer Protocol). It has been used for a couple of decades now and is still in use today. If you have your own website it’s highly likely you have also used FTP to upload your website files to the server of your hosting company.

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 major step ahead was when the web browser was introduced during 1993. The first generally available browser was called Mosaic. Suddenly anyone could log on to the ‘Net and access vast numbers of files simply by clicking on the hyperlinks embedded in a file. You could now also type in a domain name in the address bar, for example that of your university, and go to all the files they wanted to share with the word in a few seconds. Soon after Mosaic, Netscape introduced their Navigator and Microsoft followed soon afterwards with Internet Explorer.

Initially the web was for non-commercial use only, but during the ‘nineties commercial networks started to proliferate. These companies offered services like email and web browsing, suddenly putting users from all over the world in contact with each other. The history of the Internet is still being written every day, as new developments like browser add-on continue to change the environment in which we surf the web.

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Tags: computers, computers and technology, Internet, online, technology, web