US Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy launched the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The creation of the agency is an important moment in science history because it led to the creation of the internet we recognize today.
J.C.R. Licklider, a scientist from ARPA and MIT, suggested connecting computers to keep a communications network active in the US in the event of a nuclear attack. This network came to be known as the ARPA Network, or ARPAnet. Packet switching made data transmission possible in 1965, and by 1969, military contractor Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) developed an early form of routing devices known as interface message processors (IMPs), which revolutionized data transmission.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a grant to establish the Computer Science Network (CSNET) to provide networking services to university computer scientists.
ARPAnet adopted the transmission control protocol (TCP) in 1983 and separated out the military network (MILnet), assigning a subset for public research. Launched formally as the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) in 1985, engineers designed it to connect university computer science departments across the US.
Tim Berners-Lee of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) created the hypertext transfer protocol (http), a standardization that gave diverse computer platforms the ability to access the same internet sites. For this reason, Berners-Lee is widely regarded as the father of the world wide web (www).
The Mosaic web browser, created in 1993 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was a key development that emerged from the NSFNET. Mosaic was the first to show images in line with text, and it offered many other graphical user interface norms we’ve come to expect today.
The Google search engine is born, changing the way users engage with the Internet.
Web 2.0, a series of changes that would propel the Internet into its place as a social system took place during a relatively short period of no more than five years, from around 2004 to 2009. The term "Web 2.0" does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to cumulative changes in the way Web pages are made and used. Sites began to focus substantially upon allowing users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to Web sites where people are limited to the passive viewing of content.