Key Milestones in the History of the Internet

Key Milestone in the History of the Internet

May 04, 2025

By Thals Volmar

The steps leading to the birth of the Internet can be derived from two realities: The sharing of information between scientists and researchers in time, and the tension that existed between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. The history of the Internet was therefore started in the 1960s¹ when the tension between the two blocks mentioned above was growing.

The search for mechanisms that would lead to an efficient information sharing and connection between computers was necessary to facilitate certain tasks of researchers; Besides this fact, the threat of launching nuclear weapons between the Soviet Union and the United States pushed the latter to develop a sustainable communication system that could be protected in the event of nuclear attacks, and this is how the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANet) was established.

The ARPANet project is the first communication system that allowed a network of computers to communicate with each other and was developed very late in the 1960s and effective in 1969. The project was led by the US Department of Defense, particularly the Pentagon, with the aim of establishing a link between computers in American research establishments. ARPANet used packet switching to allow computers to communicate, in fact, packet switching is a method that breaks data into smaller units for transmission across a network.

The project was started with a few computers, so once the network grew larger or at least the switching packets increased, it became a little more complicated to integrate them into a single global network. Therefore, from the mid-1970s, the Americans Cerf and Khan addressed the issue and ended up developing the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. This work did not stop there, it was later enriched with another protocol called Internet Protocol, or IP; and put together, these protocols give TCP/IP.

TCP/IP is an evolution of ARPANet that allowed different computers on separate networks to communicate with each other in a virtual space. Therefore, from the beginning of 1983², TCP/IP was adopted as the standard protocol and marked the beginning of the Internet. However, for a complete Internet service, it was necessary to wait until the 1990s³ for further enrichment. Therefore, in 1989, the Englishman Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, aka WWW or W3, as a system for sharing data between higher education institutions.

W3 designated an interconnected global data system developed from key concepts such as Uniform Resource Locators (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). These technologies gave rise to the modern Internet. The years 1993 and 1994 marked the beginning of the general public's browsing of websites. In the 2000s, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter began to appear, as did e-commerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, and more. Even today, the milestones in the history of the internet continue to unfold, as we witness the continuous changes brought about with artificial intelligence (AI) since the 2020s.