Internet History

In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense began work on a project called ARPAnet. This Advanced Research Projects Agency Network was created to deal with the need for fool proof communications. They joined up with work done by the National Science Foundation to create new technologies, protocol, and equipment that later became commercialized and spread to every corner of the world.

Formed to provide reliable communications and information exchange in the event that part of the country's communications might be blown out by a bomb, the network combined the intelligence of government and university researchers. The first internet was available only to scientists and researchers, and the occasional hacker, using UNIX workstations. Later, development of Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, which used a graphics based Web browser, opened the internet use to PC and Mac users.
With commercialization, especially in the mid-1990s, the system experienced a boom of its own. Previously, service providers like AOL and CompuServe were used mostly for e-mail and chat rooms to their own customers. By joining into the World Wide Web, they could reach more users. The Internet then became a switching system, connecting people and service providers worldwide through its mail system. This meant that an AOL user could now communicate with a CompuServe user, and vice versa.
Suddenly, ISPs grew numerically, and access to the internet became available to everyone. Those using Web protocols (HTTP and HTML) became the majority of all Internet users. It is estimated that by the year 2009, approximately one quarter of the Earth's population uses the Internet and its services.

Today, there is far more than just e-mail and information sharing on the internet. Popular usage includes complete file transfers and file sharing, video and voice transmissions, online gaming ( like the browser game DarkOrbit ), emergency messaging, instant news alerts, and more.