Question: @Ciaran when was the internet invented?

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 14 Nov 2014:

It’s hard to pin down an exact date for when the internet was invented. People have been looking into communicating between computer networks as far back as the 1960s, but they were always on a small scale, whereas the internet isn’t just a network of computers, it’s a network of networks, and those early projects couldn’t hope to manage that kind of complicated data. Still, they were a start.

The main way that the internet shifts data around the world is called Transmission Control Protocol/Internetworking Protocol, or TCP/IP, and was developed in the 1970’s, but the details of it weren’t finally agreed upon until the 1980’s. Even then, there were very few computers able to communicate with other computers around the world, so the internet still hadn’t happened.

Over the next few years networks that could use TCP/IP were expanded across mostly America, mostly by hooking up colleges and big research institutes first. The internet technically started around here, and spread to other countries around 1985, but it was still very much exclusive to big organisations like universities and supercomputers. It still wasn’t available to the public until the late 1980’s when internet providers started coming into existence.

The internet of the late 80’s and early 90’s was very sparse and awkward. You had no web browsers. In fact, you had no web at all, and if you wanted to talk to another computer network you had to know the exact phone number for your computer to dial. The best you could hope for was a chat room with other internet users, but text only, no fancy fonts, no smiley faces, no sidebars and lists of active users unless you asked the network to send you one.

It was CERN in France that developed the World Wide Web and turned the internet into what you see today. They’d come up with a way of displaying information with hypertext transfer protocols (that’s what the http stands for in your web browser, it’s a fancy name for the website links you see after the http:// part of the address), and had just intended to use it on the computer networks at CERN to improve communications, but they quickly realised how much the rest of the internet could benefit from HTTP and they let the idea spread, and people used this to create pages of text in HTTP that all linked together, forming websites.

So the internet was technically invented around 1975, but it didn’t really start getting built until 1985-1990, and HTTP didn’t rally kick off until about 1991, and the internet just exploded with growth since then.

I prefer the 1991 date, because that’s when the internet started being really easy to use and everyone could really start talking to each other.

Here’s a picture of the internet, such as it is, around 1992 in America:

Not very complicated, is it?

Now here’s a a website that has an image of the internet back in 2003. Notice the change? http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/what-the-internet-looks-like

There’s also a YouTube video further down describing a computer program that lets you see just how staggeringly complex the internet has become. you’ll find a lot of people saying that it’s starting to look a bit like a brain, which is interesting if you’re familiar with the Terminator films…