A history of the internet

Rise and dramatic fall: Nasdaq index of tech shares 1994-2008

The internet was not established by one corporation or country; its history is a tangled web of different milestones and contributors.

The sheer speed at which the world has ‘logged on’ is put into sharp context by a US government report: “The internet’s pace of adoption eclipses all other technologies that preceded it. Radio was in existence 38 years before 50 million people tuned in, TV took 13 years to reach that benchmark. 

“Sixteen years after the first PC kit came out 50 million people were using one. Once it was opened to the general public, the internet crossed that line in four years.”

As is often the case with new innovations, the technology needed to support the World Wide Web was developed for different purposes to their eventual use. The first modems were developed to help transmit data for US air defence. 

Efforts were made to accomplish data transfer across existing telephone wires, and as early as the end of the 1950s the US air force was using modems. However, the first commercial device was not available until 1962 and over the subsequent 15 years efforts were focused on transmitting data at a faster speed. 

The easy scalability of online businesses encouraged dotcom entrepreneurs to plan for international expansion before they’d even got the basics right in a medium still in its infancy

Dial-up internet access establishes a dialled connection to the internet via the use of telephone lines. Dial-up connections are widely available as they only require a telephone line, but broadband internet access now dominates the online world as it offers a faster speed for roughly the same price.

Before the internet was available to the public, the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established the first network in 1969, called the ARPANET. Charles Herzfeld, ex-director of ARPA, explained how this forerunner to the web grew out of sheer “frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators who should have access were geographically separated from them.”

The ARPANET had several small computers called interface message processors, which were connected to each other through modems that enabled the exchange of data between different computers. As word spread more computers were connected to ARPANET and it gradually grew into something which – while light years away from today’s intuitive web where you can network, share images, watch videos and listen to music – laid some foundations for the modern internet. 

The ARPARNET pioneered email, telnet (a remote connection service for controlling a computer) and file transfer protocol, which allows information to be sent from one computer to another in bulk.

In 1989 the network later known as the World Wide Web was created by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who also created the computer language called HTML, which 21 years later remains the lingua franca of online code. 

Berners-Lee almost makes the genesis of his paradigm-changing invention sound almost straightforward: “I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and – ta-da! – the World Wide Web.” The first web page became available in 1991.

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which supervises web development. The London-born engineer also launched the World Wide Web Foundation, whose ambitious mission is to “advance the web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the web as a medium for positive change.”

Dotcom bubble

In 1995 there was tremendous growth in the number of internet users, and entrepreneurs and programmers alike began to recognise the World Wide Web’s potential as a digital shopping mall. ‘Dotcoms’ proliferated to colonise the new medium and a digital gold rush sent share prices soaring.

It was understandable that the most transformative new medium since television should spark such an investor stampede, but in their excitement a certain detail was overlooked: few of this first wave – dubbed Web 1.0 – had enough customers to even break even. 

Quite simply, not enough people were yet using the internet and fewer still trusted it as a medium through which to shop. Many websites were simply too ambitious at a time when the majority of web users still used dial-up modems. 

The most notorious example, perhaps, was the e-tailer Boo.com. Launched with much fanfare, the clothing retailer was too graphics-heavy, making it glacially slow to upload pages and, despite the assistance of an animated sprite called Miss Boo, it was also confusing to navigate.

The easy scalability of online businesses encouraged dotcom entrepreneurs to plan for international expansion before they’d even got the basics right in a medium still in its infancy. Another characteristic of the new dotcom model, low overheads, fuelled complacency about managing costs, and venture capital millions were lavished on launch parties and, in one case, a multimillion dollar advertising slot at the Super Bowl.

By 2001 the party was over, with countless dotcoms going to the wall. The bubble had well and truly deflated, leaving many investors counting heavy losses. 

Many dotcoms, for all their hyperbole, ceased trading having never made a profit. Not all of the early websites were ‘dot-bombs’, however, which is why dotcoms are so popular among entrepreneurs today.

The auction site eBay brought classified listings to a medium perfectly suited for the task. This site, BusinessesForSale.com, also harnessed the filtering and storage capacity of the web, launching the first online classifieds directory of business opportunities in 1995.

Amazon was the first company to truly get the online shopping model right. Hotmail pioneered email and brought it to the masses.  

The most significant phenomenon of all, though, surely, was Google, the website of websites. Without the brainchild of American students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, navigating the still-proliferating billions of web pages make the search for a needle in a haystack seem an easy task.

Surviving on the internet is fiendishly difficult; technology advances at such a rate that a website must evolve constantly to keep pace. The web is littered with hitherto stellar successes now in precipitous decline or effectively moribund (so make sure you think carefully about long-term prospects when surveying websites for sale).

Friends Reunited, for example, was eclipsed by MySpace which in turn has been outflanked by the aesthetically cleaner, more intuitive Facebook. Together with Twitter and other social networks, the site now accounts for roughly a quarter of time spent online.

Part of a continuum that takes in forums and email, modern social networks empower the user to communicate, interact and share information – always cornerstones of the World Wide Web but seemingly even more fundamental to its future