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The Advent of the Internet

As early as 1945, the groundwork for the Internet was laid with a visionary named Vannevar Bush. It all began quite humbly and unobtrusively with Vannevar's invention of a human interface, storage and retrieval system (oNLine System or NLS), hypertext and the development of the first pointing device.

In 1969, with the onset of smaller computers, which spoke the same language, developers of these machines found themselves in the advent of the Internet. As computers began to run on the same network, the first gateway was constructed and the predecessor to the World Wide Web (WWW) - the APRANET - was in place.

The 70's brought such innovations as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Network Control Protocol (NCP). These networking advances allowed computers to be connected directly to the APRANET. The standards for communication via the Worldwide Web eventually became Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Ethernet was developed at the hands of Harvard graduate and Xerox Research employee Bob Metcalfe and sealed the future of the Internet by stabilizing the way data was carried.

In 1980, Sir Tim Berners-Lee of CERN corporation in Geneva, created what would later be deemed a "browser." Its originally intended purpose was to collate information for scientists. Using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as the standard for which to view documents, Berners-Lee's browser allowed access to the Internet giving users the ability to store and transmit information. The World Wide Web came to fruition with the development (and ready acceptance) of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which allowed the creation of Web pages as we know them today.

The tale doesn't stop there. With the rising and setting of the sun everyday, the Internet grows, morphs, expands and opens new doors to brighter horizons.

Read our complete article Internet Explained