Nowadays, people rely on the Internet for everything: from communication, to sharing media, to even for something as simple as keeping in touch or meeting new people. It’s difficult to imagine what life would be without the Internet, although it’s something that most of us born in the 80s or 90s would be familiar with.
The Internet was first envisioned in the 1960s by JCR Licklider, who proposed a global link of computers and called it the "Galactic Network." One of Licklider’s believers back then was Lawrence Roberts, a MIT Researcher. During the latter part of the decade, Roberts would be working with several others to develop ARPANET, which along with other packet switching systems developed in other parts of the world, would become the backbone of today’s Internet.
The term “Internet” itself was not used until 1974, when Stanford University’s Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine published "RFC 675", the first full specification of TCP. It took another decade, however, before the first TCP/IP-based wide area network was introduced. It was then that all ARPANET hosts switched over from the older NCP protocols.
By the late 1980s, the early incarnations of e-mail went on the Internet platform with the approval of the interconnection between NSFNET and the commercial MCI Mail system in 1989. Other e-mail companies like Compuserve and Telemail soon followed.
The Internet, as most people know now, began in 1991 with the introduction of the World Wide Web project. The launch of the Web made the Internet more user-friendly that even today’s children without programming backgrounds could understand and operate it. With the widespread use of computers at home, schools and offices, and the development of high-capacity and reliable telecommunications systems, the Internet is now a very common part of everyday life for more than a billion people worldwide.
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