This paper flow chart shows the beginning of what we now know as the Internet or World Wide Web (www). It began as ARAPANET, a computer based communication link between institutions engaged by the Defense Department for advanced research projects in the late 60's. ARAPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency. Before the net, researchers wanting to share computer files or communicate had to travel to the institution which possessed them or pick up a telephone and fax paper. Using a technology called "packet sharing" the software contained the data in packets and transmitted it to remote sites. Soon after ARAPNET's inception, a satellite link was established with the UK that was the beginning of the global web. In 1983 ARAPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocol allowing the establishment of a "network of networks", or what became known as the Internet. ARAPNET was decommission several years later as obsolete. At first the Internet grew slowly, confined to research institutes, businesses, and universities using computing equipment; twelve years after the first message was transmitted on ARAPANET only 213 computers were attached to the network. Today the modern internet has 1.94 billion websites and 4.1 billion internet users globally, and most everyone has a "device" that allows them to access a planet full of information.
Not is all ones and zeros in digitland, however. A noted founder of the modern internet, Tim Berners-Lee*, warned in a open letter marking the 30 anniversary of the globe-changing technology that the web is plunging into a "dysfunctional future." Berners-Lee cites a "system design that creates perverse incentives”, and abuses by individuals and governments based on "deliberate, malicious intent”. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a recent notorious example of the risk involved using the Internet. Facebook was fined £500,000 by the UK internet watchdog, IOC, for sharing demographic information of 50 million users without their permission. Berners-Lee demanded in his letter that tech companies not just pursue short term profits, but help create a web future that is competitive, innovative and open, while also protecting users rights and freedoms while on-line.
*a British engineer and computer scientist who, while working at CERN, proposed a information management system in 1989 and that same year successfully implemented communication between an HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) client and server via the Internet. CERN was the site of the first ever website, http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.htm