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Many scientists had already anticipated the existence of worldwide networks of information, Nikola Tesla played with the idea of a “world wireless system” in the early 1900s.
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J.C.R. Licklider popularized the idea of an "intergalactic network" of computers. Soon after, computer scientists developed the concept of "packet switching," a method of efficiently transmitting electronic data that would later become one of the main building blocks of the Internet.
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ARPA Network: The existing national defense network relied on telephone lines and wires that were susceptible to damage. In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider, a scientist from ARPA and MIT, suggested connecting computers to keep a communications network active in the US in the event of a nuclear attack.
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The Internet started as a way for government researchers to share information.
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Another major milestone during the 60’s was the inception of Unix: the operating system whose design heavily influenced that of Linux and FreeBSD (the operating systems most popular in today’s web servers/web hosting services).
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Email was first developed by Ray Tomlinson, who also made the decision to use the “@” symbol to separate the user name from the computer name.
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It began when Michael Hart gained access to a large block of computing time and came to the realization that the future of computers wasn’t in computing itself, but in the storage, retrieval and searching of information that, at the time, was only contained in libraries. He manually typed the “Declaration of Independence” and launched Project Gutenberg to make information contained in books widely available in electronic form, this was the birth of the eBook.
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The year that brought the first unsolicited commercial email message (later known as spam), sent out to 600 California Arpanet users.
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The Stanford University Network was the first local area network connecting distant workstations. In 1981, the NSF expanded ARPAnet to national computer science researchers.
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Scott Fahlman proposed using a smile emoji after a joke, instead of the original -) proposed by MacKenzie.
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The transition from ARPAnet to TCP and IP open networking protocols accelerated the spread of networking technology.
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Tim Berners-Lee of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) created the hypertext transfer protocol (http), a standardization that gave diverse computer platforms the ability to access the same internet sites. For this reason, Berners-Lee is widely regarded as the father of the world wide web (www).
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The Mosaic web browser was the first to display text-aligned images and offered many other GUI standards that we look forward to today (such as the browser's URL bar and back / forward / reload options for viewing web pages).
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Soon, the Internet provider model created network access points that allowed the commercial and lucrative side of the Internet to develop.
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YouTube launched in 2005, bringing free online videos.
