The rise of the internet

The internet and its global distribution has fundamentally changed the way we create, disseminate, receive and react to information. In the 1960s, three different groups were working on this new technology that would allow a new means of sharing information electronically. None of the three knew what the others were doing because … there was no internet! Information about research was usually exchanged at conferences and through publications in academic journals. In the late 1960s, ‘the internet’ was four nodes connecting four research labs at four large universities. These nodes later served as the backbone for what eventually became the internet.

As research continued, advances in computer technology allowed multiple nodes and then networks to be added to the ‘backbone’. At about the same time, the first application for the internet was created – e-mail. In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation funded access to supercomputers for research labs and universities, allowing more researchers access to the cutting edge technology of the time, including the fledgling internet. In the early 1990s, use of the internet was opened to commercial entities. In 1990, the introduction of the World Wide Web allowed hypertext documents to be linked into a system, with access from any node. If you knew what you were looking for you had speedy access to new information from other researchers.

With growing amounts of information available on the internet, discovering what information was available was a problem. To address the problem of identifying information, browsers were created. To address the need for non-computer experts to be able to use these browsers, computer programs were created to translate words into computer commands. Once this was accomplished it meant that anyone could use the system without having to know a computer language. As computers began to get smaller and more affordable, they became available to smaller institutions, businesses and, finally, the general public.

Many uses of the early public internet were static – mailing lists, online forums and bulletin boards, along with e-mail and the early stages of online commerce, were among the first uses. The availability and increasing affordability of computer equipment during the early 2000s meant that more people could buy the equipment that allowed them to use the internet. Increased memory and storage devices allowed more applications to be created.