The internet is more than pervasive in contemporary culture. Rather, it’s the very platform used by nearly everything. These days it’s nearly impossible to have a business, a club, or to simply find out information about something without using the internet. Therefore, the people who conceived of it are owed a tremendous debt! This article will illuminate how the internet came to be and seeks to give credit where credit is due.

In the 1960s there was a group of American visionaries from a host of different advanced institutions who saw the promise of computers able to share information in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider at M.I.T. first proposed first proposed a computer network of global reach in 1962 and moved to the Advanced Defense Research Projects Agency in 1962 to help in development. Leonard Kleinrock from UCLA developed an important advancement known as “packet switching” which was essential for the basis of internet connections. The first person to connect computers to telephone dial up connections was a man named Lawrence Roberts from MIT. It was an important, progressive step, but it also exposed the limitations of this means of communication. Further development was still necessary.

Still though, it was clear that progress had been made. In fact, the internet was first truly brought online in 1969 when four computers from major universities from the South Western United States were hooked up. The universities were UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, UCSB and the University of Utah. After about a year more schools from the same region got hooked up, and these four schools were joined by MIT and Harvard. Within a year from that, computers were being hooked up in greater numbers, and not only by schools, but by institutions like NASA.

Now the internet is used for endless amounts of reasons, but then there was no practical reason for the everyday person to use it. It was used by experts, scientists, engineers, and even librarians, and the code wasn’t user friendly the way. Navigating it was hard work-nothing like the surfing of today! As well, it was used as a fallout plan in the case of nuclear war; should a bomb disable the information on one computer the information would seamlessly be rerouted to a safer location.

Over the next few years, the internets implications were gradually being understood. Its uses expanded and it was made easier to use. Libraries started developing catalogues around the world. In the early eighties the technology paving the way for emails was developed. Later in the decade, the foundations of hyper text (a form of embedding links in text articles) began development. This was completed in 1991 and became known as the World Wide Web. Originally the internet was sponsored by the government so it took years before its commercial potential became utilized.

From today’s perspective, where new breakthroughs happen almost daily, it’s hard to imagine how many years it took this long to develop a technology that’s become so essential!

Author Bio: Trying to get the fastest high speed internet service?