Its history is complex and involves many aspects – technological, organizational, and community. The Internet today is a widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of what is often called the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting in an extremely effective transition of research results into a broadly deployed and available information infrastructure.

There is the social aspect, which resulted in a broad community of Internauts working together to create and evolve the technology. There is the operations and management aspect of a global and complex operational infrastructure. There is the technological evolution that began with early research on packet switching and the ARPANET (and related technologies), and where current research continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as scale, performance, and higher-level functionality. This history revolves around four distinct aspects. In this paper, 3 several of us involved in the development and evolution of the Internet share our views of its origins and history. Learn more about how we are building a bigger, stronger Internet in 2021. A trip to almost any bookstore will find shelves of material written about the Internet. Much material currently exists about the Internet, covering history, technology, and usage. This is intended to be a brief, necessarily cursory and incomplete history. Today, terms like “ ” and “” trip lightly off the tongue of the random person on the street. Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the government, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new technology. The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and development of information infrastructure. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before.

A brief history of time online