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The history of the Internet has begun in the middle of the 20th century as a result of rapid development of computer science. Computers of that age were still relatively underperforming and needed constant maintenance. Some kind of an effective and automated method of time-sharing between users needed to be devised and implemented for them to work reliably.
The first idea that had emerged from that necessity was a concept of multi-tasking. Nowadays we don’t pay much attention to the fact that our computers perform many tasks at once, and that with our computers we can, for example, work and listen to music at the same time.
The second idea would be a proposition to merge multiple computers into a single network. Each participant of such a network would be able to exchange data with the others. But the exact mechanism of implementation was still largely a mystery. Roughly for ten years the scientists were developing and discarding all kinds of ideas, one after another, preserving those that could be at least somewhat handy bit by bit.
One should make a distinction between terms ‘the Internet’ and ‘the World Wide Web’. The first one relates to the network architecture in itself. The second one is more of a modern development and constitutes an interface that allows the access to a network for a user. It emerged in 1990 courtesy of CERN scientists, Tim Berners-Lee in particular. He was the inventor of terms such as HTTP, HTML, and also of a web browser.
In 2020 nearly 4,5 billion people are using the Internet both for work and communication.
This promising technology still continues its development nowadays, and for now we can’t even fathom what new discoveries this further development can bring.
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