President Curtis
The internet can be traced back to the 1960s, when transmission of digital information started out in its infancy.
What we call the internet, first started as a project for the United States government.
A network called the ARPANET, or Advanced Research Projects Agency Network was established in 1969, as a communication network for the Department of Defense.
In order for the network to work, it needed to have a way for information to be sent reliably, from one point of the network to another.
These blocks of information that are sent are called packets, and they need to be transmitted multiple times, simultaneously.
To do this, a set of rules needed to be created. In the 1970s, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn created two sets of rules to do exactly that, the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP.
In 1982, TCP/IP was introduced as the standard networking protocols on the ARPANET, which remained under the control of the government through most of the 1980s.
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created an application called World Wide Web, later renamed Nexus, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.
Using a NeXT computer, Berners-Lee created the first web browser that allowed a user to navigate through pages of information using links to connect phrases to additional pages.
With this browser, Berners-Lee also created the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, and the Hypertext Markup Language, HTML. He also created the very first web server, called httpd.
In 1991, the High-Performance Computing Act was created and introduced, by then Senator Al Gore, and led to the funding of many new technologies, including Mosaic.
Mosaic was the first commercially successful web browser that capitalized on the commercialization of the internet and was created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina.
To continue the development of the web as an open standard, Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. This organization owns the rules and standards for various languages, like HTML, CSS, SVG, and more.
The W3C, though, is a slow organization. It takes many years for a standard to be reviewed, recommended, and approved for use. So, some people got impatient. Over time, groups splintered off to create their own specifications.
One of those organizations is called WHATWG, standing for Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. It continues to develop HTML as a living standard, meaning that it will never be finished. And W3C is taking components of it, and it's building a draft of the new HTML 5.1 standard.
As the technology started to gain momentum with consumers and corporations, an organization needed to be created to ensure coordination and maintenance of internet procedures. In 1998, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, was created.
This non-profit organization organizes the various terms and phrases used to connect web addresses, like .com, .net, .ca, .uk, and others, with the numeric protocols on the web.
Andreessen would then later create Netscape Communications and continue to popularize the web browser and expand the technology.
Over the course of the last 20 years, Netscape technology evolved into the web browsers that we use every day, on our own computers, tablets, and phones.
Today, companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Opera, Mozilla, and others, expand and redefine how browsers work and how applications function on the internet.
But even with all the changes that have been made, fundamentally, the internet is based on the designs that were created almost 50 years ago and will continue to scale and evolve into the future.
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