I was looking for a line in the UK series Red Dwarf when I came across a plethora of pages musing about the beginnings of the internet. Many answers were given from 1965 when the first email was sent to 1991 when the world wide web was released.Okay, first of all, the internet is not email. You wouldn't be reading this if it was. And it's not the web either. I worked with the Xanadu project team who were the ones responsible for writing Hypertext. Html was supposed to allow people to transmit documents and keep the biblios in order. The current version is a complete travesty compared to the original intent.
No, look at the word: Inter- net. You see, once upon a time, you couldn't connect from one side of the country to the other without a long distance call. Yes, in the early 80s there were "networks" but most people did internet stuff on local "Bulletin Boards". Mostly colleges and universities provided local network access, and major providers like AOL (Apple on line), Prodigy (no, not the band), and Genie were just huge, dialup boards with no national connectivity.
Some nodes, that had overlapping service, would connect to each other to allow users to extend services to greater areas. I used to dial up to a BBS called MNet. It served southern Michigan via dialup and short wave (yes, transmission of modem signal over ham radio... the first WiFi). MNet was within the boundaries of MichNet, the local Michigan Statewide network. MichNet could connect to Ilinet, the university of Chicago, which had a link to Some Corporation in St.Paul. These sorts of links went on and on.
Eventually, these links became part of ARPANET. A network begun on the west coast and reached all the way across to the country by the 1970s. And legitimately, this could be called an internet. However, it was never intended as a public access net. A great deal of email traffic was sent through Arpa, true, but this was almost exclusively amongst college staff and students. The real internet was yet to come.
In the early 80s, the National Science Foundation was considering linking up Arpa, local networks, and a number of supercomputers to the national board servers to see if they could benefit from it, and added a second net for the military. It was the inception of the NSF net that was the real internet. Finally AOL could email UMass and then off to Xerox in California. the date of decision for this great project was April 15th 1985. It took until 1986 to really get going.
They decided to wait 10 years before the first review, but it took no time at all. By 1990, All the major providers had linked up and the local networks like Michnet and individual universities; and they were all working pretty much seamlessly in one vast network. This was the first real "internet". In 1995, the NSF reviewed the internet and decided that the NSFNet was more of a distraction than an aid. So the project was ended and the connections were rebuilt by the private sector. It took a few weeks to stabilize, but when it came back on line, May of 1995, we had the Internet as we know it today.
