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THE BEGINNING
U.S. military's funding of a research network dubbed Arpanet in 1969. -
WHY IT WAS USED
Arpanet was for the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Back in 1969 when Arpanet was created, it connected five sites -
THE MILITARY
In 1983, the U.S. Defense Department spun-off MILNET*, which was the part of Arpanet that carried unclassified military communications. -
RENAMED
Arpanet was renamed the Internet in 1984, when it linked 1,000 hosts at university and corporate labs. -
NEW IDEAS
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web as a method of publishing information in a hypertext format on the Internet. -
BUY ONLINE
E-commerce burst on the scene in the mid-1990s, and it's been growing ever since - both in total sales and as a percentage of all retail sales. -
EXPLOSION
Internet usage has exploded since 1995, when researchers first started tracking this statistic. Although estimates vary from the Internet having 1 billion to 1.5 billion users -
PROTECTION
In 1998, the U.S. Department of Commerce privatized domain name registrations and operations through the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. -
HACKING
Back in 2003, an estimated 15 billion spam messages were sent over the Internet daily. That means 45% of all e-mail messages were unsolicited pitches for things such as drugs and penny stocks. -
NOT JUST COMPUTERS
By 2012, more people will access the Internet via cell phones than PCs. Their favorite activities will be downloading music, videos and ringtones rather than searching the Web or sending e-mail.
