Billions of people across the world use the Internet daily but how many actually know what it is and how it evolved.

In the 1950s and early 1960s most communication networks had limited capability and in the main were constrained to dedicated points on a specific network. Very few networks had gateways or bridges between them and where they did the bridges tended to be limited in nature or were built specifically for a single use. One prevalent computer networking method was based upon the central mainframe method simply allowing its terminals to be connected via long leased lines.

The Internet

The World Wide Web (www.) or the Internet as it is more commonly known was set up in 1969 by the US Department of Defence to promote joint research with American universities. At the time the primary requirement was to create quick, dynamic access to a multitude of information. From such a comparatively humble beginning it spawned a global, information super-highway.

The Internet comprises thousands of local area networks serving thousands of local area networks, connected and interconnected by national and international networks. The Internet now embraces more than 160 countries, government ministries, numerous universities, research laboratories and multiple ‘blue chip’ corporate companies. The members of these communities are linked by local, sometimes private “networks”, that allow them to share databases (text, sound and visual images), bulletin boards, electronic mail, video conferencing, etc. Any make of computer, a modem and a telephone line, patience and a certain amount of computer skills are all that is required to connect to the Internet.

The American Government viewed the Internet as a national treasure trove and initially the use of it was largely free. The White House itself is connected to the Internet and by presidential decree all federal departments in the US, including the CIA, must publish over the net. By the mid nineties America’s National Science Foundation who controlled an important part of the net allowed businesses to start charging for services on the network.

In the Great Britain ‘JANET’ was created to be Britain’s national research and higher education network and forms part of the global super-highway. Following its inception in 1984 ‘JANET’ developed rapidly and continues to serve about 200 sites including all universities and many research laboratories. The network supports electronic mail and files transfer and is primarily used to convey information from the file store of one computer to the file store of another. Interactive terminal access to remote computers, information services and directories is widely used and there has been rapid growth in the number and variety of information services readily available. Advance tools (search engines) were developed to allow users to explore and navigate information space together with the creation of user interfaces based upon windows and graphics.

As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realised the increasing need to be able to find and organise files and information. Projects such as Gopher, WAIS, and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to organise distributed data. Unfortunately, these projects fell short in being able to accommodate all the existing data types and in being able to grow without bottlenecks.

 One of the most promising user interface paradigms during this period was hypertext. In 1991, Tim Berners-lee was the first to develop a network-based implementation of the hypertext concept. This was after Berners-Lee had repeatedly proposed his idea to the hypertext and Internet communities at various conferences to no avail—no one would implement it for him. Working at CERN, Berners-Lee wanted a way to share information about their research. By releasing his implementation to public use, he ensured the technology would become widespread. Subsequently, Gopher became the first commonly-used hypertext interface to the Internet. While Gopher menu items were examples of hypertext, they were not commonly perceived in that way.
Scholars generally agree, however, that the turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction of the Mosaic (web browsers) In 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by then Senator Al Gore’s High Performance and Communications Act of 1991 Indeed, Mosaic's graphical interface soon became more popular than Gopher, which at the time was primarily text-based, and the WWW became the preferred interface for accessing the Internet.

Mosaic was eventually superseded in 1994 by Andreessen's Netscape Navigator, which replaced Mosaic as the world's most popular browser. Competition from Internet Explorer and a variety of other browsers has almost completely displaced it. Another important event held on 11th January 1994, was The Superhighway Summit at UCLA’s Royce Hall. This was the "first public conference bringing together all of the major industry, government and academic leaders in the field [and] also began the national and ultimately international dialogue about the Information Superhighway and its implications.

Search engines

Even before the World Wide Web, there were search engines that attempted to organize the Internet. The first of these was the Archie search engine from McGill University in 1990, followed in 1991 by WAIS and Gopher. All three of those systems predated the invention of the World Wide Web but all continued to index the Web and the rest of the Internet for several years after the Web appeared. There are still Gopher servers as of 2006, although there are a great many more web servers.

As the Web grew, search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the Web and allow people to find things. The first full-text Web search engine was Webcrawler 1994. Before WebCrawler, only Web page titles were searched. Another early search engine, Lycos, was created in 1993 as a university project, and was the first to achieve commercial success. During the late 1990s, both Web directories and Web search engines were popular - Yahoo (founded 1995) and Altavista (founded 1995) were the respective industry leaders.

By August 2001, the directory model had begun to give way to search engines, tracking the rise of Google (founded 1998), which had developed new approaches to relevancy ranking. Directory features, while still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines.

Database size, which had been a significant marketing feature through the early 2000s, was similarly displaced by emphasis on relevancy ranking, the methods by which search engines attempt to sort the best results first. Relevancy ranking first became a major issue circa 1996, when it became apparent that it was impractical to review full lists of results. Consequently, algorithms for relevancy ranking have continuously improved. Google's Pagerank method for ordering the results has received the most press, but all major search engines continually refine their ranking methodologies with a view toward improving the ordering of results. As of 2006, search engine rankings are more important than ever, so much so that an industry has developed to help web-developers improve their search ranking, and an entire body of case law has developed around matters that affect search engine rankings. The sale of search rankings by some search engines has also created controversy among librarians and consumer advocates.

Number of Internet Users

In its "Worldwide Online Population Forecast, 2006 to 2011," JupiterResearch anticipates that a 38 percent increase in the number of people with online access will mean that, by 2011, 22 percent of the Earth's population will surf the Internet regularly.

JupiterResearch says the worldwide online population will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 6.6 percent during the next five years, far outpacing the 1.1 percent compound annual growth rate for the planet's population as a whole. The report says 1.1 billion people currently enjoy regular access to the Web.

Social Change

The World Wide Web has led to a widespread culture of individual self publishing and co-operative publishing. The moment to moment accounts of blogs, photo publishing and the information store of Wikipedia are a result of the open ease of creating a public website. One of the fastest growing websites, YouTube offers user generated videos so instead of consuming data from the website, users produce. This is a new form of interactivity that has changed the way people use the internet. In addition, the communication capabilities of the internet are being realised with Voice over IP protocols (VOIP) both in enterprise networks and commercial telephone services such as Skype or Vonage. Increasingly complex on-demand content provision have led to the delivery of all forms of media, including those that had been found in the traditional media forms of newspapers, radio, television and movies via the Internet. The Internet's peer-to-peer structure has also influenced social and economic theory, most notably with the rise of file sharing.

Some of the material in this article was sourced from Wikipedia