History of the Internet

The first idea of the Internet came from a small business. The employees basically setup a network between computers but allowed people to connect to their network from outside of the office. The first email system was also made through this and the use of the @ (at) symbol was first used for this. The first internet network moved at a fairly slow 50 kilobytes per second and it had 4 hosts. By the time email had been integrated into the system, there were 23 hosts. All of this happened between 1968 and 1972.

TCP/IP Protocols were made by the same company a year later. This allowed diverse computer networks to connect and communicate with one another.

In 1973, the first international connection was made between computers. A college in London was the first to make an international connection to the ARPANET (the creator the original internet network talked about above).

Between 1973 and 1983, a lot of new systems were introduced that included people chatting and talking over a network without email.

In 1983, the first Domain Name System was created. In 1988, one of the first ever internet worms hit, it affected 6,000 of 60,000 hosts. The Internet Relay Chat was introduced the same year.

In 1990, the first commercial internet provider was started by world.std.com, since then, there are thousands of new Internet Service Providers including the now increasingly popular Cable, DSL and Satellite connections. Thousands of companies have come online in the last 10 years in hope of selling more online where people don't even have to leave home to get what they want.

Since the creation of the Internet in 1968, there are now 1.3 million domain names and 147 million or more hosts, there are also nearly 40 million websites online, this brings new meaning to having a site for everything.