The Early Years

The Early Years

In the 1980s there was a widespread development and use of
LAN’s, PC’s and workstations. This allowed the Internet to flourish.
By 1985, the Internet was refined and well-established as a
technology and although it was still limited, mostly to researchers
and developers, regular computer users started using it for daily
activities. Electronic mail or e-mail was the most used application
and its interconnection between different mail systems was
demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications
between people.

Until this time, networking protocols were still being developed.
However, the major protocol that was polished at the time
was TCP/IP. In fact, by 1990, the ARPANET was decommissioned
and TCP/IP had displaced most other Wide Area Networking
(WAN) protocols and was fast becoming the accepted protocol
for internetworking.

After a while, the World Wide Web came into existence. A consortium
called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was also
formed which was led initially by Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of
the WWW) and Al Vezza. The W3C is the consortium that has
taken on the responsibility for evolving the various protocols and
standards associated with the web. This happened in 1992.

Soon after this, the commercialisation of the Internet started
taking place. There was a marked increase in the number of communities
across the Internet. Bulletin Board Services and Usenet
groups were now home to more computer users than ever before.
With the advent of such information, corporations and businesses also started looking at the Internet in terms of business viability.

In 1994, Pizza Hut started offering pizza ordering on its Web
page while First Virtual, the first ‘cyberbank’, launched its online presence. By this time, there were more than 3,864,000 hosts on
the Internet. Since then, the Net has grown rapidly and the
process continues to this day.