For both businesses and individuals, the Internet is now the medium of
choice, largely because it enables you to present your wares to the entire world on a 24/7
basis. But the technology??™s origins were more ominous than and very different from the
ever-growing, sprawling free-for-all that exists today.
In the 1960s, the American military was experimenting with methods by which the US
authorities might be able to communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. The suggested
solution was to replace point-to-point communication networks with one that was
more akin to a net. This meant information could find its way from place to place even if
certain sections of the network were destroyed. Despite the project eventually being
shelved by the Pentagon, the concept itself lived on, eventually influencing a network that
connected several American universities.
During the following decade, this fledgling network went international and began opening
itself up to the general public. The term Internet was coined in the 1980s, which also heralded
the invention of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the networking
software that makes possible communication between computers running on
different systems. During the 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee was also busy working on HTML, his
effort to weld hypertext to a markup language in an attempt to make communication of
research between himself and his colleagues simpler.
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