In the late 1960s the US Department of Defense fearful of the intentions and capabilities of the enemies, created a distributed network that linked military computers together.
During 1940s and early 1950s, many of the graduate students and scientists at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory gained the preliminary experience necessary to create network computers. One of the engineers from Lincoln was Lawrence Roberts, who later became a founding father of the internet.
The first experimental network using internet-like technology involved four supercomputers and was built in 1969.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet) was set up in 1969 and was one of the world's first operational packet switching networks. It evolved into several innovations in the early 1970s such as e-mail, a file transfer protocol that allows data to be sent in bulk and remote connecting service for network computers. As the project grew during the next decade, students were gained access to ARPAnet as hundreds of college and university networks were connected to it.
Starting in 1972, hundreds and then thousands of early users began to discover electronic mail as a new basis for communication.
In 1986, the NSF (National Science Foundation) launched the NSFNET backbone, a high speed network connection between six supercomputer centers running across the United States.
Within nine years, The NFSNET backbone grew from 6 nodes at 56 kbs to 21 nodes at 45 mbs, connecting 50,000 networks on all seven continents. In 1995 NSF turned the management of the World Wide Web portion of the internet over a group of public company.
The word internet entered the common lexicon in or about November 4, 1988 when many large American newspaper first mentioned the network in their coverage of computer.
History of internet
