The U.S. Department
of Defense laid the foundation for the Internet roughly 40 years ago with
a network called ARPANET. But the general public didn't use the
Internet much until after the development of the World Wide Web in the
early 1990s. As recently as June 1993, there were only 130 Web
sites. Now there are millions. Here's a quick look at how it
all came to be.
In 1957, the
United States government formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA), a segment of the Department of Defense charged with ensuring
U.S. leadership in science and technology with military applications.
Just more than a decade later, in 1969, ARPA established ARPANET, the
forerunner of the Internet.
The World Wide
Web came into being in 1991, thanks to developer Tim Berners-Lee and
others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, also known as
Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN).
Domains divide
World Wide Web sites into categories based on the nature of their
owner, and they form part of a site's address, or uniform resource
locator (URL).
