PUBLICIZATION OF THE INTERNET

By the mid-eighties, there were thousands of computers in the ARPA network. However, the internet still wouldn’t be fully available to the public for several more years. In 1979, a few small companies saw the internet as a great opportunity. They opened and began selling access to private networks, allowing the public their first taste of what the internet was soon to become. However, these types of private networks weren’t actually allowed on the internet, so they were isolated from the rest of the world and each other. ARPANET was government run, so they only allowed a few scientists and colleges to access their features.

Of course, that changed only a few years later. By 1985, the US government had achieved everything they had intended for the internet, and so much more. They were ready to pass it on to a new program, and there was no better candidate than the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET project. While NSFNET was also rather strict about commercial traffic, in 1988 they allowed a few private networks access to the internet. CompuServe and MCI Mail became the first companies to provide the public with access to email services on the internet. The next year, we started to see Internet Service Providers (ISPs) popping up, which connected people to the internet rather than providing their own network.

In 1995, NSFNET shut down and handed internet management over to the ISPs. The number of computers in the 90s skyrocketed. By the end of the year, the web had over 10,000 servers, and had to undergo many changes in order to increase internet speed (at this time the internet still ran on dial-up, so it was very slow!). As more and more people logged on, the internet began to change–and so did the world.