The History of the

Internet

Agenda

Internet History
Internet Evolution
Internet Pioneers
Internet Growth
The Future of the Internet
Conclusion

Precursors of the Internet

The Internet could not have existed
without the two major inventions of the
19th Century, electricity and the
telegraph system. 1-2
To a lesser degree, broadcast media such
as radio and television

What is the Internet?

Plain and simple:
A worldwide system of interconnected
networks and computers.

What is a Network?
A computer network is an interconnection
of a group of computers.

Evolution of the Internet

ARPANET
Was the world's first operational
network, and the predecessor
of the global Internet

ARPANET
ARPANET was developed by the U.S.
Department of Defense. One theory
was that it was developed to survive a
nuclear attack. That theory is often
disputed by scientists.

The Internet was an Accident!

The Internet was a result of an
unsuccessful military and academic
research program!

Why is it called the Internet?

Short for internetworking. (3)

The World Wide Web (4)

 The original Internet provided screens

full of text
Great for sharing info and accessing the
Library of Congress
Text was all one font and size
BORING!

GUIs

(Graphical User Interface) (5)

GUIs added some color and layout, but

still were not very interesting.

The World Wide Web Saved

the Internet!

Hyperlinks were invented (7)

www.stmsaints.com
The mouse (8) was invented to click on
hyperlinks
The URL (Uniform Resource Locater)
(6) was invented. This allowed sites to
be named.

Creation of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners Lee (9) brought all of this
together to form the World Wide Web in
1990.

Mosaic (10): The First Web

Browser

Very slow
Did not handle loading pictures very
well
Modems were very slow
Did not give an indication of the
potential of this medium

1994 A Big Year for the WWW

Tim Berners Lee in develops the World
Wide Web Consortium to develop
standards for the Web
Netscape is founded (11)

The Explosion of the Internet

1994 -- 2000
The Internet exploded during this
period.
The first commercial site was
Amazon.com.(12)
In 1994 the World Wide Web grew by
an astounding 2300 percent!
Amazon saw that online shopping was
the wave of the future.
The rest is history

Browser Wars
Netscape was the standard until 1998
It folded and was taken over by
AOL(13)
Microsoft Internet Explorer snagged
96% of the browser market
IE has only recently been challenged by
the excellent Mozilla (14) browser

Future of the Internet

Internet II
So many businesses and private
citizens have come online that
academic users can't get the highspeed connections they need.

Internet II
Organized as a consortium
Led by over 200 universities
Dedicated network for educational and
research purposes

References
Romeo, J. R., Business Journal (Central
New York); 9/6/2002, Vol. 16 Issue 36, p22,
2p
http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/96/10.
31.96/Internet_II.html