While some firms had local networks in the early- Sixties, there was no host-to-host connection until 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense created ARPANET. The first data exchange over this network resulted in the computers crashing when researchers tried to simply send the letter ‘g’. However, it was soon up and running at four computers across the US.
While the Internet was working by the Seventies and Eighties, and spreading, it was nothing like we know it today. It focused on the backbone of computer operations, data the user wouldn’t see. In the late-Eighties, a researcher at CERN called Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues developed a system through which users of the Internet would be able to access text-based ‘pages’, which would later become websites (the world wide web). Their system involved the use of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), allowing communication between network servers and computers. They developed an early web browser that allowed users to navigate these text pages, which was released to the public in 1992. The first ‘point and click’ graphical interface browser arrived a year later from Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape) at the University of Illinois, and was called Mosaic.
- How It Works Book of Space