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A short history of the Internet
Military origin of the Internet
The Internet will shortly celebrate its 40th birthday.
It all began towards the end of the 1950s at the height of the Cold War.
The US military research department working with some university researchers started the internet in 1969 by setting up the first communication network that could operate even when under a nuclear attack.
This internet was based on a decentralised system that could keep working even if one or more machines were destroyed. The star-shaped form of the network meant that transmissions could follow several different routes, depending on the degree congestion.
Internet development in major world universities
Rapidly, it became possible to develop this network in the world of research through technological advances such as the invention of electronic mail in 1972.
Shortly afterwards, universities throughout the world copied their American colleagues and set up their own networks.
The beginnings of commercial exploitation of the Internet
In the early 1980s, the net in the USA split in two with, on one side, a strictly military network and, on the other, a scientific network, which forms the basis of the Internet as we know it today.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, achieved a breakthrough by inventing the Web. From then on, the Web allowed people to search for information and display it in a standard simplified format.
Commercial exploitation began in the 1990s.
Some fifteen years later, one person out of seven in the world surfs the Internet.
In other words, nearly one billion surfers or 14.6% of the world population have access to the Internet.
