History of the internet
1960's
The explosion in the use of computers began with 'Third Generation' computers. These relied Jack St. Claire
Kilby's invention - the integrated circuit or microchip; the first integrated circuit was produced in September 1958
but computers using them didn't begin to appear until 1963. While large 'mainframes' such as the I.B.M. 360
increased storage and processing capabilities further, the integrated circuit allowed the development of
Minicomputers that began to bring computing into many smaller businesses. On November 15, 1971, Intel
released the world's first microprocessor, the 4004 - and a technology on which the fourth generation of computers
are based. The microprocessor locates much of the computers processing abilities on a single (small) chip. Coupled
with another of Intel's inventions - the RAM chip (Kilobits of memory on a single chip) - the microprocessor
allowed fourth generation computers to be even smaller and faster than ever before. The 4004 was capable of
60,000 instructions per second, but later processors (such as the 8086 that all of Intel's processors for the IBM PC
and compatibles is based) brought ever increasing speed and power to the computers. Supercomputers of the era
were immensely powerful, like the Cray-1 which could calculate 150 million floating point operations per second.
The microprocessor allowed the development of microcomputers, personal computers that were small and cheap
enough to be available to ordinary people. The first such personal computer was the MITS Altair 8800, released at
the end of 1974, but it was followed by computers such as the Apple I & II, Commodore PET and eventually the
original IBM PC in 1981.
1970's
Although processing power and storage capacities have increased beyond all recognition since 1972 the underlying
technology of LSI (large scale integration) or VLSI (very large scale integration) microchips has remained basically
the same, so it is widely regarded that most of today's computers still belong to the fourth generation.
1980's
It wasn't until the early to mid 1980s that the services we use most now started appearing on the internet. The
concept of 'domain names', things like 'www.microsoft.com' (Microsoft's web server), wasn't even introduced
until 1984 - before that all the computers were just addressed by their IP addresses (numbers). Most protocols for
email and other services appeared after this.
1990's
The graphical interface opened up the internet to novice users and in 1993 it's use exploded as people were allowed
to 'dial-in' to the internet using their computer at home and a modem to ring up an 'Internet Service Provider' (ISP)
to get their connection to this (now huge) network. Before this the only computers connected were at Universities
and other large organisations that could afford to hire cables between each other to transfer the data over - but now
anyone could use the internet and it evolved into the 'Information Superhighway' that we know and (possibly) love
today.