The military had to seek safer communication options than the telephone system in place at the time. The phone lines had to be switched and connected manually in the operator room any time someone made a call. The fear was that a bomb could wipe out an operator room and completely shut down their communications. This need was shortly addressed. One of the first computing communications was the hot potato method which involved slicing data up into small fragments and transmitting them.
The benefit to this was that if a path was broken, there were alternate paths available for the network to establish a connection on. Based on initial tests this proved to be faster than telecommunications. This remedial network structure was quite limited, especially in the case of ARPA. ARPA had a desire to remove redundancies of having multiple computers that could only connect to one other device and needing separate terminals for each computer.
In 1992 the government had released their control over the network and made it available to the public. This is the largest milestone in the birth of the internet, This allowed users and businesses to find new uses for the network that were previously disregarded.
Tim Berners-Lee, who is generally credited with founding the modern internet, then came into the picture. He developed software known as the World Wide Web (WWW), named after the idea that links on a website could lead you down to another website and so on, kind of like a web. This allowed users to follow information and reach webpages, although fairly tough to do. Following the invention of the web, we see the creation of the web browser created by Netscape. This made the web more user and beginner friendly. You could now visually see the websites instead of terminal files and folders. It was filled with bright pictures and plain text, and made navigation quite easy with the assistance of the mouse, hence the browser name Navigator.. The user base of the web had grown by 341,000% as a result.
