The Early Years

In the 1980s there was a widespread development and use of LAN’s, PC’s and workstations. This allowed the Internet to flourish. By 1985, the Internet was refined and well-established as a technology and although it was still limited, mostly to researchers and developers, regular computer users started using it for daily activities. Electronic mail or e-mail was the most used application and its interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications between people.

Until this time, networking protocols were still being developed. However, the major protocol that was polished at the time was TCP/IP. In fact, by 1990, the ARPANET was decommissioned and TCP/IP had displaced most other Wide Area Networking (WAN) protocols and was fast becoming the accepted protocol for internetworking.

After a while, the World Wide Web came into existence. A consortium called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was also formed which was led initially by Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the WWW) and Al Vezza. The W3C is the consortium that has taken on the responsibility for evolving the various protocols and standards associated with the web. This happened in 1992.

Soon after this, the commercialisation of the Internet started taking place. There was a marked increase in the number of communities across the Internet. Bulletin Board Services and Usenet groups were now home to more computer users than ever before. With the advent of such information, corporations and businesses also started looking at the Internet in terms of business viability.

In 1994, Pizza Hut started offering pizza ordering on its Web page while First Virtual, the first ‘cyberbank’, launched its online presence. By this time, there were more than 3,864,000 hosts on the Internet. Since then, the Net has grown rapidly and the process continues to this day.