History of the Internet

"The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of  originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France. The U.S. Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s, including for the development of the  project, directed by  and managed by . The first message was sent over the ARPANET in 1969 from computer science Professor 's laboratory at  (UCLA) to the second network node at (SRI).

 networks such as the , ARPANET, , , and , were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of .  first demonstrated packet switching in 1967 at the  (NPL) in the UK, which became a testbed for UK research for almost two decades. The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for , in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.

The  (TCP/IP) was developed by  and  in the 1970s and became the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET, incorporating concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed by . In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the  project, which also created network access to the  sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial  (ISPs) began to emerge in the very late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990, and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

In the 1980s, research at CERN in Switzerland by British computer scientist  resulted in the , linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology, including the rise of near-instant communication by , ,  (VoIP) telephone calls, , and the  with its , , , and  sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as  in the United Kingdom and  in the United States. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way  networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007. Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and . However, the future of the global internet may be shaped by regional differences in the world."