Internet and the World Wide Web

The Internet was born in 1983 as a product of academic and scientific communications. Universities and other academic institutions formed a network to connect their internal networks to a larger system, and these communications were built on standards or protocols for addressing systems and for exchanging data. Called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), these included the word Internet that came to identify the huge, global network in use today.

By linking their communications, the original users of the Internet were able to exchange electronic mail (now known as e-mail), use file transfer protocol (ftp) to exchange data, obtain access via telephone lines to computers at other locations (through telnet), and to converse using newsgroups and bulletin boards. By the 1990s, the Internet was the common bond among millions of computers.