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The Evolution of the World Wide Web

The Internet can be traced back to the invention of computers and networking in the 1950s, long before the world wide web came into existance. In the early 1960s the Department of Defense finalized the first Computer Network, ARPANET. While working with ARPANET, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web to harness the Internet and connect his hypertext documents together. ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990 but limited private connections to the Internet in several larger cities by the late 1980s were growing and when NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, they removed the last restrictions to public use of the Internet, paving the way to a commercially viable superhighway.

The first website went online August 6, 1991, written by Tim Berners-Lee but when the Global Network Navigator website was launched in 1993 with limited advertising, the Internet came to life. It was the first officially commercial website. Between 1984 – 1988, TCP/IP was launched throughout the country. It was a more stable packet switching network for sending bursts of infomation across the Internet. The UUCP Usenet Network which was a worldwide discussion network and a precursor to TCP/IP, or early Bulletin Board Style Service was used by universities and techies that could connect through a dial-up service to gain access to the World Wide Web. This was a Unix based system. Usenet officially switched over to TCP/IP which was a more expansive Internet technology and allowed browsers to more easily serve graphics, audio and other high level file types to be shared over the new World Wide Web.

In the early days of the World Wide Web and Internet, people found it difficult to connect to a World Wide Web Server and coverage was limited in many areas. Usenet and Gopher based Bulletin Board Services were the easiest way to connect to the Web. Larger cities had to buy blocks of phone numbers to provide access points to the World Wide Web so coverage was limited and spotty. Plus, dial-up was expensive and per minute. Most people avoided staying online for lengthy times, usually to read some news, get email, or post a comment on a discussion board. Once dial-up service connections became stronger, streaming larger packets of data, the web changed. Companies like America Online began setting up online Service Communities often limiting its users to the outside World Wide Web. In future years, fiber-optic services were installed, cable modems and the like that blurred the seperation of broadcast television with digital websites. Servers became easier to set up in local markets and smart phones allowed programmers to fully harness the new Java Technology, first developed by Sun Microsystems in 1995. It was a way to send data across the Internet and decode into machine-like languages [the low level language that powers computers] allowing live videos, instant messages, location based GPS services and more. Some Smartphones run on Google's version of Java, called the Android Operating System.

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