It's undeniable that the internet have become an integral part of our lives, but where did it all begin? What is the difference between the World Wide Web and the internet? What is ARPANET? What is HTML? All this and more will be explained in a timeline of the roots of the internet to where we are today.
Before the internet, there were several competing networks which would eventually lay the foundation to what we have today. One of these was ARPANET, of which the first computers would be connected in 1969. It was an early adopter of technology that forms the basis of the internet, for example packet switching, a staple of modern internet infrastructure.
TCP/IP, or the Internet protocol suite, is now a combination of several protocols, the Internet Protocol (IP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). However when it was established in 1974 it was made up of only TCP. In 1983 this technology was adopted by ARPANET, as a year earlier it was declared the standard for military computer networking by the US Department of Defense. The widespread adoption of TCP/IP was essential for the creation of the Internet, as it allowed the existing networks to intercommunicate and merge.
The NSFNET was created in 1986 to connect supercomputing centres funded by the National Science Foundation. It included TCP/IP in its initial deployment, allowing interconnection with ARPANET and others, leading to it becoming the principal internet backbone. Access was initially limited to the government and universities, however restrictions were removed in 1991 so it could compete in the newly emerging Internet service provider market, which had been formed 2 years earlier by the first commercial ISPs who provided direct access to the Internet for the public.
The WWW's origins are found in 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee submitted a memorandum to CERN on information management, where he conceptualised a "hypertext" system where one could read a document, and immediately link to any of the references via clicking on a link. He worked on three technologies for this: a uniform resource locator (URL) which would be a unique identifier to locate a resource, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) which would be the publishing language for WWW pages and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which would allow for the transmission of hypertext documents, or what we now know as webpages. In January of 1991 the first web servers outside of CERN were activated, and over the next few years new browsers for rendering hypertext and organisations to create open standards for the emerging technology would form, giving us the World Wide Web which is crucial to today's internet. Although the internet clearly includes other technologies than the WWW, nowadays the two terms are often interchanged in casual conversation.