The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France. The U.S. Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET, which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol. The first message ever sent over the ARPANET was from Leonard Kleinrock’s laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
In the early 1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the establishment of national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s, allowing for public access to the Internet and the beginning of the Internet’s commercialization.
The Internet has since grown to connect millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing. The rapid growth of the Internet, along with its increasing accessibility, has led to a significant impact on culture, commerce, communication, and technology worldwide.