A Somewhat Brief History of the Internet

From ARPANET To WWW To The Internet We Know Now

The series of tubes which we all now spend way too much time on started out as a DoD program in 1969 to connect computers over the existing phone network with IMPs.  Those were the first of what later became routers and were about the size of your average fridge.   Later came ALOHAnet and SATNET which used radio and satellite respectively and proved the rule of computer standards true once again; one global standard to rule them all simply begets multiple standards which are often incompatible.

Then came TCP/IP and an actual working implementation of hypertext, aka Xanadu, which until then was simply a concept.  In order to leverage the new links there was Archie, developed at McGill University in Montreal, Gopher from the University of Minnesota and Apple’s HyperCard.  The web in the late ’80s and ’90s started to resemble the Internet we know now, though in a far more textual form.  This lead to browser wars and a proliferation of search engines which puts what we have today to shame.

Finally came the swarm of users as the internet became accessible and interesting to the general public.  As always, people ruined it.  The areas which were once safe to download … freeware … files from started to be filled with garbage and viruses.  Search engines needed to monetize themselves somehow and the <BLINK> tag had yet to be banished.  Webrings fell to Web 2.0, Newgrounds.com sucked up inordinate amounts of our ‘free’ time, llamas started to wear hats, and viral videos began to spread and burninate the web.

These and more are part of Ars Technica’s final post on the history of the internet.