The Pre-Web: Arpanet and Internet

By ARTHUR C CLARKE PREDICTS THE INTERNET provided by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) [CC-BY-SA-3.0-au], via Wikimedia Commons

Before the Web

The Internet was created in 1969 when Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) worked with four universities to bring up the first four nodes of ARPANET, the decentralized network that was eventually renamed, Internet. Before ARPANET became Internet, a lot of pieces had to fall into place. Although futurists could see the potential of connected computers and communications devices to change the world, both at a global and a personal level, it took a lot of building to make things happen. The explosion of technology that has followed since 1969 has been incredible.

The history of the Internet is well-documented on several sources. A couple of good summaries of the history are:

• A Brief History of the Internet from the Internet Society
• History of the Internet on Wikipedia It is important to understand that the Internet is the network that the World Wide Web operates on top of. The "web" uses the underlying communications protocols of the Internet in order to facilitate communication. Technically, addresses on the World Wide Web all begin with "HTTP," which is an acronym for HyperText Transport Protocol. HTTP could not work without the Internet, and in the eyes of many users the "internet" and "web" are the same thing.