The History of The Internet – A 50-Year Journey

The Internet has made the world into a hyper-connected global village. A century ago, connecting with someone on the other side of the world on a real-time basis would have been scoffed off as an impossible idea. In fact, radio had just become a mainstream technology. The telephone was a luxury that was restricted to a very few users. Instant connectivity was hard to come by. Analog wires made connectivity difficult, and the quality was nothing close to the broadband quality of today.

With the ARPANET, Internet technology leapfrogged from being a novel idea to a firm technology that could be scaled and made accessible to millions of users all over the world. The interesting thing about the Internet is that it has no single inventor. It was a collective project for the whole world that tech enthusiasts took great interest in and contributed with a feverish passion.

In time, the Internet grew into a force of its own. The first domain was registered in 1985. Five years later, the Internet gave us the first search engine. It was nothing like Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines that we have today. Nevertheless, for a web that had very few records, Archie was a big breakthrough that increased the user base of the Internet.

In 1994, Yahoo! Was born. It was a landmark event in the history of the Internet. Yahoo! Put the Internet within reach of ordinary users. In fact, it even triggered the gold rush of chat rooms, emails, and communities.

4 years later, the biggest milestone in the history of the Internet took place. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, thus laying the foundation for what the Internet would become today.

But, some rough times awaited in 2000. The dot-com crash sent thousands of websites and the businesses dependent on them down the drain. However, those tough times did not last long. In fact, by 2003, WordPress was launched. It helped turn blogging into an amateur hobby. It was the first form of content marketing in the digital era.

The next major shift was the advent of Twitter, Facebook and the whole world of social media. Today, we cannot think of an Internet without social media. In fact, it has become the synonym for the Internet. The next big leap in the Internet would come in the form of chatbots.

In fact, mobile apps and websites have already integrated chatbots into their fold. Chatbots are intelligent software that can understand and respond to customer queries in real-time. They are infused with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, making them a mighty force that will sculpt the future of the Internet.

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