The internet has had a relitively brief, but explosive history so far. It grew out of an experiment began in the 1960's by the U.S. Department of Defense. The DoD wanted to create a computer network that would continue to function in the event of a disaster, such as a nuclear war. If part of the network were damaged or destroyed the rest of the system still had to work. That network was ARPANET, which linked U.S. scientific and academic researchers. It was the forerunner of today's Internet.
In late,1971, Larry Robertsat DARPA decided that people needed serious motivation to get things going. In October1972 there was to be an International conference on Computer Communication, so Larry asked Bob Kahn at BBN to organize a public demostration of the ARPANET.
In 1985, the National Science Foundation(NSF)created NSFNET, a series of networks for research and education communication. Based on ARPANET protocols, the NSFNET created a national backbone service, provided free to any U.S. research and educational institutions. At the same time, regional networks were created to link individual institutions with the national backbone service.
In 1990, HTML, a hypertext Internet protocol which could communicate the graphic information on the Internet, was introduced. Each individual could create graphic pages (a Web site), which then became part of a huge, virtual hypertext network called the World Wide Web (WWW). The enhanced Internet was informally renamed the Web and a huge additional audience was created.