Internet: Past, Present, and Future, The

The Internet’s Past The Internet is a child of the 1960s, with its roots dating back to 1969 when the first network of computers, ARPANET, communicated with one another. It took a full decade before the Internet Protocol was developed. In 1984, the domain name system was created, bringing with it the familiar suffixes of .com and .org. Still primarily academic, the Internet wasn’t widely used until the 1990s when two significant developments arrived. In 1991, the World Wide Web was ushered in. Hyperlinks made navigation much easier than in the past. And in 1993, the first Web browser, Mosaic, arrived, making for a graphical user experience. By the mid-1990s, an estimated 45 million users were using the Internet. By 2000, that number exploded to over 400 million. The Internet was officially here to stay.