A Little History on the Internet

The idea of a home-based global information system dates back at least as far as 1959 as depicted in Isaac Asimov’s short story “Anniversary”, in which characters look up information on a home computer connected to a “planet wide network of circuits”. Interestingly enough, it was 1990 before Tim Berners-Lee, “the father of the world wide web”, an independent contractor at CERN, Switzerland, completed all the tools necessary for a working web – the first browser, the first web server, and the first web pages that described the project itself. In keeping with its birth at CERN, early adaptors of the web were primarily university-based scientific departments who used the web to share data- the dark ages before graphics were introduced. The turning point for browsers came in 1993 with the introduction of a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The browser became known as Netscape Navigator in 1994. By 1996, only three years after the birth of the first graphical browser, it became obvious to most publicly traded companies that a public Web presence was no longer optional. While many people saw the possibilities of free publishing and two-way communication, the brightest pioneers realized new business models including Web-based commerce and instantaneous communication. Behold, the first interactive agencies were born.