Everything you want to know about how the Internet evolved

-Karthik Gurumurthy

The internet is basically this massive digital network connecting millions of computers worldwide through phone lines and wires. It’s like a giant web of connected computers sharing the same software and languages. People use it for sending emails, joining newsgroups where folks talk about specific topics, and accessing all kinds of information services.

A lot of people think “World Wide Web” and “Internet” mean the same thing, but that’s not quite right. The Web is actually just one piece of the Internet (though admittedly the main part) that we use to access information.

About 5 years back (back in 1997), only about 57 million people were using the Internet.  I remember during the time, the experts predicted that would grow to 377 million by 2000 – which seems tiny compared to today! People were using it for pretty basic stuff – sending emails, checking the weather, booking flights, reading online magazines, researching products, writing papers, and even a bit of shopping.

The whole thing started with ARPANET in 1969, created by the U.S. Department of Defense. They connected just four universities initially – UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. It was designed as a secure network for defense researchers to communicate and stayed running until 1990.

Scientists who got their hands on ARPANET quickly realized its potential for scientific research, which led to the National Science Foundation creating NSFNET in 1984. Over time, various organizations contributed to its growth, and it eventually became known as the Internet – named after the “Internet Protocol” which is basically the language computers use to talk to each other over the network.

Most people in the ’90s were getting online through universities, government agencies, big corporations, or commercial providers like America Online and CompuServe. There were two groups managing the whole operation – the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Network Information Center – handling daily operations, technical standards, and naming networks.

In 1998, they had this cutting-edge development – internet access through special $500 phones using something called Java (created by Sun Microsystems). These phones had tiny 7-inch color screens and keyboards!

The World Wide Web itself is this massive interface giving access to countless pages of information. Websites have these unique addresses called URLs – those long strings with slashes and periods that contain codes for the computer language (usually “http”), the server location, the type of organization (.gov, .edu, .com), and the specific file.

If you didn’t know a website address, you’d use search engines like Infoseek, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, or WebCrawler. You’d type in keywords and get results in seconds – pretty revolutionary back then! Websites were connected by hyperlinks – those underlined or colored words that take you to related sites when clicked.

The Web itself was born in 1989 at CERN in Switzerland. By 1992, they had created the first browser, but it was text-based and required complex commands that only computer experts could handle. The real breakthrough came in 1993 when NCSA Mosaic was released with a graphical interface – suddenly regular people could just point and click! Then in 1994, Netscape Navigator became the world’s most popular browser (this was way before Internet Explorer).

Email was one of the internet’s killer apps. You could send messages to one or many people, get notifications when someone read your message, forward stuff to others, and store everything in a virtual “mailbox” on a server. Organizations like companies and universities provided email services to their members, plus there were national and international subscriber networks.

It’s wild to think how far we’ve come from those early days!