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A Brief History of the Internet
By Konstantine William Kyros, Esq.
The Idea.
The notion that the sum of human knowledge could be collected into a giant database or computer system has long been a staple of science fiction. Few dreamed that the sum of human experience could be personally called up on individual desktops. At least one visionary, Vannevar Bush, head of the Wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II (and Vice-President of MIT) dreamed of such a system. He called it the Memex: a system that would enable people to store and search for information using trails to link text and images. Bush expressed these ideas at the dawn of the computer age-1945, in an article entitled "As We May Think," published in the Atlantic Monthly (true internet junkies have dug up this article and actually read it).
Xanadu.
Inspired by visions of the Memex, Theodor Holm Nelson conceived the
idea of creating documents with tiny built-in programs which could transport
the user to other documents in a distant computer. Nelson called this system
hypertext. For decades Nelson labored to create a program he called Xanadu.
Xanadu promised to be capable of collecting vast amounts of information
and deliver it with complete 
interactivity-the user would
be able to sort and respond to the information directly. Nelson promulgated
this idea with the sense that this technology would eliminate conflict
by increasing communication throughout the world. Nelson's vision is still
alive and in development in Japan, but the wind has been taken out of his
sails since the advent of the world-wide-web (see below).
The Structure.
The internet had its genesis in 1957 when the USSR launched sputnick (the first satellite). In response to the perceived advanced state of Soviet technology, the US government formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Which consisted of a group of very smart scientists to who began work on various projects. One of the projects resulted in a communications network called the ARPANET. The network was designed so that it continue functioning in the event war knocked out any part of it. This network grew throughout the 1970's but its use was confined to research scientists and the military.
In the mid-1980's the National Science Foundation (NSF) created a network based on the technology of the ARPANET . The NSF's network was structured so that its super computers could be used to facilitate nationwide scientific research. Soon area universities were linked together and each area network was linked to one of the NSF's super computers. Today the network has dramatically expanded and by far most of it is privately owned.
W3
Various programs were designed to function on these networks, including email as early as 1973. However, the breakthrough came in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN (a Swiss physics lab) had succeed in creating software capable of creating documents in hypertext--documents that could link back and forth in the manner you accessed this document. The language used to create these documents he called HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language). Lee is also responsible for adding HTTP and URL to our vocabulary. HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) is a format that allows all computers in the world to view hypertext documents. URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is simply the format which must be followed in creating and naming a document on the WWW.
Netscape
The structure created by Tim Berners-Lee was still incomplete: html
needed to be translated by individual computer owners using software called
a browser.
A twenty-three year old programmer named Marc Andreesen developed a browser
he called mosaic, that was easy to use and paved the way for the fantastic
growth of the www. In 1994, Jim Clark (former chairman of Silicon graphics)
and a team of programmers including Andreeson developed a more sophisticated
browser and named it (and the company) Netscape. When the company went
public in 1995 the stock soared to nearly 4 billion by December 1995.
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