Origin of the Internet

How the Internet went from little acorns to mighty oaks

The Internet is something we all seem to take for granted these days, with hundreds of millions of people logging on every week. It has had a dramatic effect on the way we work, on our relaxation time, on how we communicate, our methods of shopping and even on the way we organise our days. There are now more than 1.8 billion users in the world, and that figure is rising all the time.

The man credited with the invention of the worldwide web is Tim Berners-Lee, a London-born, Oxford-educated engineer and computer scientist. The technology had been available for some years, having been developed during the Cold War, but it was Berners-Lee who developed it into a usable network for the general public.

The worldwide continues to grow

The development of the web continued throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s as its availability became more widespread. The Internet is strictly speaking a network of networks, which inter-connect with each other in a virtual world that is all around us. Therefore, viewing websites that are created in China is as fast and instant as viewing one that was made in the next street.

In the last few years, shopping on the Internet has become big business all over the world. The absence of international barriers has opened markets in an unprecedented way. It’s now perfectly simple to shop for books in Belgium, jeans in Japan or food in France, and all without leaving the home.

Living alternative lives on the Internet

Social networking has become increasingly popular on the web, with sites such as Bebo and Facebook attracting hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Second Life, a controversial but well-used virtual world, enables residents to create their own avatar and to interact with other users.