   #copyright

History of the Internet

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Media; Websites and the
Internet

   Originally intended to share data between a few universities and
   government agencies, the Internet today allows connectivity from
   anywhere on earth and beyond—even ships at sea and in outer space.
   Enlarge
   Originally intended to share data between a few universities and
   government agencies, the Internet today allows connectivity from
   anywhere on earth and beyond—even ships at sea and in outer space.

   The history of the Internet dates back to the early development of
   communication networks. The idea of a computer network intended to
   allow general communication among users of various computers has
   developed through a large number of stages. The melting pot of
   developments brought together the network of networks that we know as
   the Internet. This included both technological developments and the
   merging together of existing network infrastructure and
   telecommunication systems.

   The infrastructure of the Internet spread across the globe to create
   the world wide network of computers we know today. It spread throughout
   the Western nations and then begged a penetration into the developing
   countries, thus creating both unprecedented worldwide access to
   information and communications and a digital divide in access to this
   new infrastructure. The Internet went on to fundamentally alter and
   affect the economy of the world, including the economic implications of
   the dot-com bubble.

Before the Internet

   In the fifties and early sixties, prior to the widespread
   inter-networking that led to the Internet, most communication networks
   were limited by their nature to only allow communications between the
   stations on the network. Some networks had gateways or bridges between
   them, but these bridges were often limited or built specifically for a
   single use. One prevalent computer networking method was based on the
   central mainframe method, simply allowing its terminals to be connected
   via long leased lines. This method was used in the 1950s by Project
   RAND to support researchers such as Herbert Simon, in Pittsburgh,
   Pennsylvania, when collaborating across the continent with researchers
   in Santa Monica, California, on automated theorem proving and
   artificial intelligence.

Three terminals and an ARPA

   A fundamental pioneer in the call for a global network, J.C.R.
   Licklider, articulated the idea in his January 1960 paper, Man-Computer
   Symbiosis.

          "a network of such [computers], connected to one another by
          wide-band communication lines" which provided "the functions of
          present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in
          information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic
          functions. " -- J.C.R. Licklider

   In October 1962, Licklider was appointed head of the United States
   Department of Defense's DARPA information processing office, and formed
   an informal group within DARPA to further computer research. As part of
   the information processing office's role, three network terminals had
   been installed. One for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica,
   one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley and one
   for the Multics project SHOPPING at the Massachusetts Institute of
   Technology (MIT). Licklider's need for inter-networking would be made
   evident by the problems this caused.

          "For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets
          of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at
          S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or
          M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go
          over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them.

          I said, oh, my goodness gracious me, it's obvious what to do
          (But I don't want to do it): If you have these three terminals,
          there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go
          where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet."
          - Robert W. Taylor, co-writer with Licklider of "The Computer as
          a Communications Device", in an interview with the New York
          Times

Switched packets

   At the tip of the inter-networking problem lay the issue of connecting
   separate physical networks to form one logical network. During the
   1960s, Donald Davies ( NPL), Paul Baran ( RAND Corporation), and
   Leonard Kleinrock (MIT) developed and implemented packet switching. The
   notion that the Internet was developed to survive a nuclear attack has
   its roots in the early theories developed by RAND. Baran's research had
   approached packet switching from studies of decentralisation to avoid
   combat damage compromising the entire network.

Networks that led to the Internet

ARPANET

   Len Kleinrock and the first IMP.
   Enlarge
   Len Kleinrock and the first IMP.

   Promoted to the head of the information processing office at ARPA,
   Robert Taylor intended to realize Licklider's ideas of an
   interconnected networking system. Bringing in Larry Roberts from MIT,
   he initiated a project to build such a network. The first ARPANET link
   was established between the University of California, Los Angeles and
   the Stanford Research Institute on 21 November 1969. By 5 December
   1969, a 4-node network was connected by adding the University of Utah
   and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Building on ideas
   developed in ALOHAnet, the ARPANET started in 1972 and was growing
   rapidly by 1981. The number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host
   being added approximately every twenty days.

   ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet,
   and a primary tool in developing the technologies used. ARPANET
   development was centered around the Request for Comments (RFC) process,
   still used today for proposing and distributing Internet Protocols and
   Systems. RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker
   from the University of California, Los Angeles, and published on April
   7, 1969. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer
   Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing.

   International collaborations on ARPANET were sparse. For various
   political reasons, European developers were concerned with developing
   the X.25 networks. Notable exceptions were the Norwegian Seismic Array
   (NORSAR) in 1972, followed in 1973 by Sweden with satellite links to
   the Tanum Earth Station and University College London.

X.25 and public access

   Following on from DARPA's research, packet switching networks were
   developed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the
   form of X.25 networks. In 1974, X.25 formed the basis for the SERCnet
   network between British academic and research sites, which later became
   JANET. The initial ITU Standard on X.25 was approved in March 1976.

   The British Post Office, Western Union International and Tymnet
   collaborated to create the first international packet switched network,
   referred to as the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS), in
   1978. This network grew from Europe and the US to cover Canada, Hong
   Kong and Australia by 1981. By the 1990s it provided a worldwide
   networking infrastructure.

   Unlike ARPAnet, X.25 was also commonly available for business use. X.25
   would be used for the first dial-in public access networks, such as
   Compuserve and Tymnet. In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to
   offer electronic mail capabilities and technical support to personal
   computer users. The company broke new ground again in 1980 as the first
   to offer real-time chat with its CB Simulator. There were also the
   America Online (AOL) and Prodigy dial in networks and many bulletin
   board system (BBS) networks such as The WELL and FidoNet. FidoNet in
   particular was popular amongst hobbyist computer users, many of them
   hackers and amateur radio operators.

UUCP

   In 1979, two students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis,
   came up with the idea of using simple Bourne shell scripts to transfer
   news and messages on a serial line with nearby University of North
   Carolina at Chapel Hill. Following public release of the software, the
   mesh of UUCP hosts forwarding on the Usenet news rapidly expanded.
   UUCPnet, as it would later be named, also created gateways and links
   between FidoNet and dial-up BBS hosts. UUCP networks spread quickly due
   to the lower costs involved, and ability to use existing leased lines,
   X.25 links or even ARPANET connections. By 1983 the number of UUCP
   hosts had grown to 550, nearly doubling to 940 in 1984.

Merging the networks and creating the Internet

TCP/IP

   Map of the TCP/IP test network in January 1982
   Enlarge
   Map of the TCP/IP test network in January 1982

   With so many different network methods, something needed to unify them.
   Robert E. Kahn of DARPA and ARPANET recruited Vint Cerf of Stanford
   University to work with him on the problem. By 1973, they had soon
   worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between
   network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol,
   and instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the
   ARPANET, the hosts became responsible. Cerf credits Hubert Zimmerman
   and Louis Pouzin (designer of the CYCLADES network) with important work
   on this design.

   With the role of the network reduced to the bare minimum, it became
   possible to join almost any networks together, no matter what their
   characteristics were, thereby solving Kahn's initial problem. DARPA
   agreed to fund development of prototype software, and after several
   years of work, the first somewhat crude demonstration of what had by
   then become TCP/IP occurred in July 1977. This new method quickly
   spread across the networks, and on January 1, 1983, TCP/IP protocols
   became the only approved protocol on the ARPANET, replacing the earlier
   NCP protocol.

ARPANET to NSFNet

   After the ARPANET had been up and running for several years, ARPA
   looked for another agency to hand off the network to; ARPA's primary
   business was funding cutting-edge research and development, not running
   a communications utility. Eventually, in July 1975, the network had
   been turned over to the Defense Communications Agency, also part of the
   Department of Defense. In 1983, the U.S. military portion of the
   ARPANET was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET.

   The networks based around the ARPANET were government funded and
   therefore restricted to noncommercial uses such as research; unrelated
   commercial use was strictly forbidden. This initially restricted
   connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, the
   connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a
   growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and
   Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or
   providing services to those who were.

   Another branch of the U.S. government, the National Science Foundation
   (NSF), became heavily involved in internet research and started
   development of a successor to ARPANET. In 1984 this resulted in the
   first Wide Area Network designed specifically to use TCP/IP. This grew
   into the NSFNet backbone, established in 1986, and intended to connect
   and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by
   the NSF.

The transition toward an Internet

   It was around the time when ARPANET began to merge with NSFNet, that
   the term Internet originated, with "an internet" meaning any network
   using TCP/IP. "The Internet" came to mean a global and large network
   using TCP/IP, which at the time meant NSFNet and ARPANET. Previously
   "internet" and "internetwork" had been used interchangeably, and
   "internet protocol" had been used to refer to other networking systems
   such as Xerox Network Services.

   As interest in wide spread networking grew and new applications for it
   arrived, the Internet's technologies spread throughout the rest of the
   world. TCP/IP's network-agnostic approach meant that it was easy to use
   any existing network infrastructure, such as the IPSS X.25 network, to
   carry Internet traffic. In 1984, University College London replaced its
   transatlantic satellite links with TCP/IP over IPSS.

   Many sites unable to link directly to the Internet started to create
   simple gateways to allow transfer of e-mail, at that time the most
   important application. Sites which only had intermittent connections
   used UUCP or FidoNet and relied on the gateways between these networks
   and the Internet. Some gateway services went beyond simple e-mail
   peering, such as allowing access to FTP sites via UUCP or e-mail.

TCP/IP becomes worldwide

   The first ARPANet connection outside the US was established to NORSAR
   in Norway in 1973, just ahead of the connection to Great Britain. These
   links were all converted to TCP/IP in 1982, at the same time as the
   rest of the Arpanet.

CERN, the European internet, the link to the Pacific and beyond

   In 1984 the move in Europe towards more widespread use of TCP/IP
   started, and CERNET was converted over to using it. The TCP/IP CERNET
   remained isolated from the rest of the Internet, forming a small
   internal internet until 1989.

   In 1988 Daniel Karrenberg, from CWI in Amsterdam, visited Ben Segal,
   CERN's TCP/IP Coordinator; looking for advice about the transition of
   the European side of the UUCP Usenet network (much of which ran over
   X.25 links) over to TCP/IP. In 1987, Ben Segal had met with Len Bosack
   from the then still small company Cisco about TCP/IP routers, and was
   able to give Karrenberg advice and forward him on to Cisco for the
   appropriate hardware. This expanded the European portion of the
   Internet across the existing UUCP networks, and in 1989 CERN opened its
   first external TCP/IP connections. This coincided with the creation of
   Réseaux IP Européens ( RIPE), initially a group of IP network
   administrators who met regularly to carry out co-ordination work
   together. Later, in 1992, RIPE was formally registered as a cooperative
   in Amsterdam.

   At the same time as the rise of internetworking in Europe, adhoc
   networking to ARPA and in-between Australian universities formed, based
   on various technologies such as X.25 and UUCPNet. These were limited in
   their connection to the global networks, due to the cost of making
   individual international UUCP dial-up or X.25 connections. In 1989,
   Australian universities joined the push towards using IP protocols to
   unify their networking infrastructures. AARNet was formed in 1989 by
   the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee and provided a dedicated IP
   based network for Australia.

   The Internet began to penetrate Asia in the late 1980s. Japan, which
   had built the UUCP-based network JUNET in 1984, connected to NSFNet in
   1989. It hosted the annual meeting of the Internet Society, INET'92, in
   Kobe. Singapore developed TECHNET in 1990, and Thailand gained a global
   Internet connection between Chulalongkorn University and UUNET in 1992.

The Internet goes Mainstream

   1995 is generally considered to be the point at which the internet
   became known to the general public. Prior to this, the main users of
   the internet were universities and very large corporations. Strangely
   enough, this is in large part due to Microsoft.

   In 1995, Microsoft released a new version of its operating system
   called Windows 95. Included in their new operating system was a TCP/IP
   stack along with, and arguably more importantly, dial-up software that
   made initiating PPP calls easy.

   Prior to releasing Windows 95, users would have to install a 3rd party
   TCP/IP stack such as Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1 or use a Macintosh
   with third party TCP/IP software. For the very first time, there was an
   easy way for the average person to experience what university students
   and professors had been working on. The person just had to buy a
   computer that had Windows 95 on it and get an account with a fledgling
   ISP.

   One of the earliest indications that the internet had started to reach
   the general public was an article that appeared in an issue of Rolling
   Stone circa 1993 or 1994.

A digital divide

   While developed countries with technological infrastructures were
   joining the Internet, developing countries began to experience a
   digital divide separating them from the Internet. At the beginning of
   the 1990s, African countries relied upon X.25 IPSS and 2400 baud modem
   UUCP links for international and internetwork computer communications.
   In 1996 a USAID funded project, the Leland initative, started work on
   developing full Internet connectivity for the continent. Guinea,
   Mozambique, Madagascar and Rwanda gained satellite earth stations in
   1997, followed by Côte d'Ivoire and Benin in 1998.

   In 1991, the People's Republic of China saw its first TCP/IP college
   network, Tsinghua University's TUNET. The PRC went on to make its first
   global Internet connection in 1994, between the Beijing
   Electro-Spectrometer Collaboration and Stanford University's Linear
   Accelerator Centre. However, China went on to implement its own digital
   divide by implementing a country-wide content filter.

Opening the network to commerce

   The interest in commercial use of the Internet became a hotly debated
   topic. Although commercial use was forbidden, the exact definition of
   commercial use could be unclear and subjective. Everyone agreed that
   one company sending an invoice to another company was clearly
   commercial use, but anything less was up for debate. UUCPNet and the
   X.25 IPSS had no such restrictions, which would eventually see the
   official barring of UUCPNet use of ARPANET and NSFNet connections. Some
   UUCP links still remained connecting to these networks however, as
   administrators cast a blind eye to their operation.

   During the late 1980s, the first Internet service provider (ISP)
   companies were formed. Companies like PSINet, UUNET, Netcom, and Portal
   Software were formed to provide service to the regional research
   networks and provide alternate network access, UUCP-based email and
   Usenet News to the public. The first dial-up ISP, world.std.com, opened
   in 1989.

   This caused controversy amongst university users, who were outraged at
   the idea of noneducational use of their networks. Eventually, it was
   the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low enough
   that junior colleges and other schools could afford to participate in
   the new arenas of education and research.

   By 1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking
   technologies and the project came to a close. In 1994, the NSFNet, now
   renamed ANSNET (Advanced Networks and Services) and allowing non-profit
   corporations access, lost its standing as the backbone of the Internet.
   Both government institutions and competing commercial providers created
   their own backbones and interconnections. Regional network access
   points (NAPs) became the primary interconnections between the many
   networks and the final commercial restrictions ended.

The IETF and a standard for standards

   The Internet has developed a significant subculture dedicated to the
   idea that the Internet is not owned or controlled by any one person,
   company, group, or organization. Nevertheless, some standardization and
   control is necessary for the system to function.

   The liberal RFC publication procedure engendered confusion about the
   Internet standardization process, and led to more formalization of
   official accepted standards. The IETF started in January of 1986 as a
   quarterly meeting of U.S. government funded researchers.
   Representatives from non-government vendors were invited starting with
   the fourth IETF meeting in October of that year.

   Acceptance of an RFC by the RFC Editor for publication does not
   automatically make the RFC into a standard. It may be recognized as
   such by the IETF only after experimentation, use, and acceptance have
   proved it to be worthy of that designation. Official standards are
   numbered with a prefix "STD" and a number, similar to the RFC naming
   style. However, even after becoming a standard, most are still commonly
   referred to by their RFC number.

   In 1992, the Internet Society, a professional membership society, was
   formed and the IETF was transferred to operation under it as an
   independent international standards body.

NIC, InterNIC, IANA and ICANN

   The first central authority to coordinate the operation of the network
   was the Network Information Centre (NIC) at Stanford Research Institute
   (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. In 1972, management of these issues
   was given to the newly created Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
   (IANA). In addition to his role as the RFC Editor, Jon Postel worked as
   the manager of IANA until his death in 1998.

   As the early ARPANET grew, hosts were referred to by names, and a
   HOSTS.TXT file would be distributed from SRI International to each host
   on the network. As the network grew, this became cumbersome. A
   technical solution came in the form of the Domain Name System, created
   by Paul Mockapetris. The Defense Data Network - Network Information
   Centre (DDN-NIC) at SRI handled all registration services, including
   the top-level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .net, .com and
   .us, root nameserver administration and Internet number assignments
   under a United States Department of Defense contract. In 1991, the
   Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) awarded the administration
   and maintenance of DDN-NIC (managed by SRI up until this point) to
   Government Systems, Inc., who subcontracted it to the small
   private-sector Network Solutions, Inc.

   Since at this point in history most of the growth on the Internet was
   coming from non-military sources, it was decided that the Department of
   Defense would no longer fund registration services outside of the .mil
   TLD. In 1993 the U.S. National Science Foundation, after a competitive
   bidding process in 1992, created the InterNIC to manage the allocations
   of addresses and management of the address databases, and awarded the
   contract to three organizations. Registration Services would be
   provided by Network Solutions; Directory and Database Services would be
   provided by AT&T; and Information Services would be provided by General
   Atomics.

   In 1998 both IANA and InterNIC were reorganized under the control of
   ICANN, a California non-profit corporation contracted by the US
   Department of Commerce to manage a number of Internet-related tasks.
   The role of operating the DNS system was privatized and opened up to
   competition, while the central management of name allocations would be
   awarded on a contract tender basis.

Use and culture

Email and Usenet—The growth of the text forum

   E-mail is often called the killer application of the Internet. However,
   it actually predates the Internet and was a crucial tool in creating
   it. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a
   time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the history is
   unclear, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32
   and MIT's CTSS.

   The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution
   of e-mail. There is one report indicating experimental inter-system
   e-mail transfers on it shortly after ARPANET's creation. In 1971 Ray
   Tomlinson created what was to become the standard Internet e-mail
   address format, using the @ sign to separate user names from host
   names.

   A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of
   time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as
   UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system. E-mail could be passed this way
   between a number of networks, including ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNet, as
   well as to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP.

   In addition, UUCP allowed the publication of text files that could be
   read by many others. The News software developed by Steve Daniel and
   Tom Truscott in 1979 was used to distribute news and bulletin
   board-like messages. This quickly grew into discussion groups, known as
   newsgroups, on a wide range of topics. On ARPANET and NSFNet similar
   discussion groups would form via mailing lists, discussing both
   technical issues and more culturally focused topics (such as science
   fiction, discussed on the sflovers mailing list).

A world library—From gopher to the WWW

   As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people
   realized the increasing need to be able to find and organize files and
   information. Projects such as Gopher, WAIS, and the FTP Archive list
   attempted to create ways to organize 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. The technology had been inspired by Vannevar Bush's
   "memex" and developed through Ted Nelson's research on Project Xanadu
   and Douglas Engelbart's research on NLS. Many small self-contained
   hypertext systems had been created before, such as Apple Computer's
   HyperCard.

   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.

   An early popular web browser, modeled after HyperCard, was ViolaWWW. It
   was eventually overshadowed by Mosaic, a graphical browser developed by
   a team at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications at the
   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (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 Computing Act of 1991. 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 superseded in 1994 by
   Andreessen's Netscape Navigator, which grew to become the world's most
   popular browser. Competition from Internet Explorer and a variety of
   other browsers has almost completely displaced it.

Finding what you need—The search engine

   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 in 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 commercially 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
   (" search engine optimizers", or "SEO") to help web-developers improve
   their search ranking, and an entire body of case law has developed
   around matters that affect search engine rankings, such as use of
   trademarks in metatags. The sale of search rankings by some search
   engines has also created controversy among librarians and consumer
   advocates.

The dot-com bubble

   The suddenly low price of reaching millions worldwide, and the
   possibility of selling to or hearing from those people at the same
   moment when they were reached, promised to overturn established
   business dogma in advertising, mail-order sales, customer relationship
   management, and many more areas. The web was a new killer app—it could
   bring together unrelated buyers and sellers in seamless and low-cost
   ways. Visionaries around the world developed new business models, and
   ran to their nearest venture capitalist. Of course a proportion of the
   new entrepreneurs were truly talented at business administration,
   sales, and growth; but the majority were just people with ideas, and
   didn't manage the capital influx prudently. Additionally, many dot-com
   business plans were predicated on the assumption that by using the
   Internet, they would bypass the distribution channels of existing
   businesses and therefore not have to compete with them; when the
   established businesses with strong existing brands developed their own
   Internet presence, these hopes were shattered, and the newcomers were
   left attempting to break into markets dominated by larger, more
   established businesses. Many did not have the ability to do so.

   The dot-com bubble burst on March 10, 2000, when the technology heavy
   NASDAQ Composite index peaked at 5048.62 (intra-day peak 5132.52), more
   than double its value just a year before. By 2001, the bubble's
   deflation was running full speed. A majority of the dot-coms had ceased
   trading, after having burnt through their venture capital, often
   without ever making a gross profit.

Recent trends

   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 Flickr and the information store of
   Wikipedia are a result of the open ease of creating a public website.
   In addition, the communication capabilities of the internet are being
   realised with VOIP telephone services such as Skype. 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.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
