History of Internet

Have you ever wondered, "The Internet" that you use every day, how it came into existence? In 2026, we can't do anything that is not dependent on the internet. How did the solution to a problem become a trillion-dollar industry?

The Beginning

It was a time when two countries were trying to show their dominance over each other in the world. Yeah! You guessed it right. That was a time of the Cold War between the USA and USSR. The USSR Army destroyed the communication infrastructure every time. To solve this problem, the US government created the internet in the form of ARPANET.

You won't believe it, but it was created in 1969, not centuries ago. The first message sent over the internet was LOGIN between computers at UCLA and Stanford. But the received message was only LO due to some failure.

Many interpret the internet as a virtual thing, but it is not. It is a physical thing. It is a network of computers connected by cables. The cables are spread under the ocean to connect different countries.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a Legend

In 1983, TCP/IP was introduced as a standard protocol for the internet; after that, it became accessible to all of us.

In 1989, HTTP was introduced as a protocol for the web. In 1991, HTML was introduced as a markup language for the web. In 1994, URL was introduced as a standard protocol for the web. Do you know who created all these? The man, the myth, the legend, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. That's how the modern internet is working, and you are seeing this article. In fact, the World Wide Web (WWW) was also built by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Internet vs WWW

Many of us assume that the internet and WWW are the same thing. But they are not. The internet is a network of computers connected by cables. The WWW is a web browser that allows us to access the internet. We can say that the internet is the infrastructure, and the WWW is built on top of it.