The Internet is a globally connected computer communications network, available basically to anyone who has access to a computer or mobile device, that can connect to the network.
From its inception as a research tool for the scientific community, the Internet has astonishingly evolved into a distinct social phenomenon that is profoundly affecting the basic facets of human society as a whole: how we communicate with each other, how we interact culturally, how we learn, how we do business, and how we express ourselves.
The Internet came about in 1969, when the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was tasked to ensure U.S. superiority in military science and technology.
The agency established the very first computer network, called ARPANET, that initially connected computers at the Stanford Research Institute in California, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah.
Within a few years, other government research agencies and educational institutions connected to the network, but its use remained limited to scientists and engineers who knew their way around its complexity.
Continuing research over the next two decades unfolded the gradual expansion of the network within and outside the U.S., and led to improvements and exploration of its other uses, such as file transfer protocol (FTP), electronic mail, newsgroups, and indexed listings to keep track of the information, such as Archie and Gopher.
Towards the end of 1989, English computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee and other researchers at the CERN (Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire) developed a protocol based on hypertext, or text that can be linked to further information, which then made it possible to connect content on different computers across the network.
Preparing documents with this method meant virtually instant access to information on any connected computer anywhere, whilst giving users a friendly, easy to use interface to work with.
This eventually was adapted as the standard for HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, the language that is used for communicating across what is now known as, the World Wide Web.