when did the internet first become available to the public
History of the Internet In the 1980s, research at CERN in Switzerland by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network.[6] Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as JANET in the United Kingdom and Internet2 in the United States. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.[7] Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.
Internet studies As Barry Wellman argues, internet studies may find its beginnings with the 1978 publication of The Network Nation,[6] and was largely dominated by computer scientists, presenting at venues like the annual CSCW conference. These were quickly joined by researchers in business fields and library and information science.[7] By the late 1990s, more attention was being paid to systematic investigation of users and how they made use of the new technologies. During the 1990s, the rapid diffusion of internet access began to attract more attention from a number of social science and humanities disciplines, including the field of communication.[8] Some of these investigations, like the Pew Internet & American Life project[9] and the World Internet Project[10] framed the research in terms of traditional social science approaches, with a focus less on the technology than on those who use them. But the focus remained at the aggregate level. In the UK, the ESRC Programme on Information and Communications Technologies (1986â€“1996)[11] laid considerable ground work on how society and ICTs interact, bringing together important clusters of scholars from media and communications, society, innovation, law, policy and industry across leading UK universities.
World Wide Web Embedded hyperlinks permit users to navigate between web pages. Multiple web pages with a common theme, a common domain name, or both, make up a website. Website content can largely be provided by the publisher, or interactively where users contribute content or the content depends upon the users or their actions. Websites may be mostly informative, primarily for entertainment, or largely for commercial, governmental, or non-governmental organisational purposes.
History of the Internet Precursors to the web browser emerged in the form of hyperlinked applications during the mid and late 1980s (the bare concept of hyperlinking had by then existed for some decades). Following these, Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989 and developing in 1990 both the first web server, and the first web browser, called WorldWideWeb (no spaces) and later renamed Nexus.[76] Many others were soon developed, with Marc Andreessen's 1993 Mosaic (later Netscape),[77] being particularly easy to use and install, and often credited with sparking the internet boom of the 1990s.[78] Today, the major web browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari.[79]