# What year did the Internet start?



## Stephen L Smith (Mar 26, 2014)

I was curious to know what year did the Internet start in terms of availability for the average citizen using a home PC. I am aware that some Government organisations and Universities have had access to specialised computer networks for decades but I am specifically interested when the average citizen was able to access the Internet from a home based PC. Would it have been about 1994 or 1995?


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## JimmyH (Mar 26, 2014)

If I recall correctly (if I remember correctly) 1993-94. The Mosaic web browser was the first If I recall correctly .......


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## Hamalas (Mar 26, 2014)

When was Al Gore born?


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## LeeD (Mar 26, 2014)

Not sure how accurate this is, but it seems alright: The History of the Internet in a Nutshell


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## Jake (Mar 26, 2014)

The Internet dates back to at least the 60s which was in use by governments and universities. However, from the start there were ways to dial-in to the Internet for anybody. CompuServe has service dating back to the late 70s that was sold through RadioShack which made it possibly for very early home PCs to have some sort of Internet access.

In the 80s, there was something called BBS that was common on early home PCs (such as the Commodore 64). This typically involved using a modem to connect to a local PC and exchange files, and chat. This was somewhat similar to the Internet and was more commonly accessible during the 80s and early 90s.

The Internet itself is a collection of various protocols. However, it wasn't until 1990-1991 that we got the World Wide Web, which is the majority of traffic that most of us use. Basically, everything going through web browsers is part of the WWW. This is a specific program on the Internet. Still when you use an e-mail client, FTP, and other things, you are using the Internet but not the WWW.

By the late 1980s, even before the WWW, CompuServe was doing well in the PC market to connect to the Internet. AOL was also started in the late 1980s.

It was really in the 90s after the advent of the WorldWideWeb that you started to see the Internet more commonly in the home I think though. It's hard to say an exact date beyond that. 

Mosaic, as Jimmy pointed out, is a good marker for the Web as we know it. It was the first web browser to have support for images, and in many ways, it coincided with more adoption by home users. However, there were other early browsers as well. Lynx was an early text browser (that is still maintained) and I think Cello was the first Windows supported browser. The original WorldWideWeb program was developed on a NeXt computer, which is a predecessor to the modern Mac OS X system.

By the way, many of Mosaic's developers went on to start Netscape. Mozilla Firefox is descended from Netscape code. So in a way, there is a family tree going back to then for even the browser I'm using to type this now. 

So, there isn't a definite answer. I would say by 1994-1995 you were starting to see the Internet coming to more homes closer to its modern form, but it was a gradual process.


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## jambo (Mar 26, 2014)

This was actually a question on a TV quiz programme the other day. The correct answer, according to the BBC, was 1989. As Jake said above the internet has been around for some time in government and military departments but the world wide web began in 1989.


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## VictorBravo (Mar 26, 2014)

All I can say is that I was using Bulletin Board Services in 1989, using a searchable database that had statutes and case law in plain text. About a year later, in my second year of law school, I was able to sign up for Westlaw, which was almost internet--it had html coding and hyperlinks, but was run through a BBS format. 

I downloaded my first webpage on a home computer in 1992 using a text based browser that I can't remember. It was on a 286 Toshiba laptop. The document was a scientific paper on nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Being an hour away from a decent library, it was so cool to find scholarly articles over a phone line. I thought I had entered a Star Trek world. 

AOL started sending disks in the mail to people in the early-mid 90s. You'd give them a credit card number and they'd give you a free trial service. Except it was notoriously difficult trying to unsubscribe. By the mid-90s I had a niche practice of suing collection agencies who were trying to collect on cancelled accounts.


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## jambo (Mar 26, 2014)

The internet and he World Wide Web are two different things. The internet is a network of networks connecting computers, servers etc, the World Wide Web is a means of using the internet to access information. The internet has been around since the 1950s but the web since 1989, invented by Tim Berners-Lee who coincidently was also on the BBC last week on a different programme to the quiz mentioned above.


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## Gforce9 (Mar 26, 2014)

Hamalas said:


> When was Al Gore born?



Hahahahahahahahahaha.............


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## Edward (Mar 26, 2014)

Prodigy converted from a closed online service to an internet service provider in about 1994 although they kept proprietary content as well.


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## arapahoepark (Mar 26, 2014)

Ask Al Gore


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## Hamalas (Mar 26, 2014)

My dad had a personal website he created back in 1996. I remember him trying to explain to his six-year old son (aka: me) what the internet was. I totally didn't get it.


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## Jake (Mar 27, 2014)

jambo said:


> This was actually a question on a TV quiz programme the other day. The correct answer, according to the BBC, was 1989. As Jake said above the internet has been around for some time in government and military departments but the world wide web began in 1989.



1989 is a strange year to quote. He proposed a similar program in 1989, but 1990 was the year that Sir Tim Berners-Lee added key features like hyperlinks, developed it, and announced to the public a more complete version. And it went live in 1991.


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## jwithnell (Mar 27, 2014)

Wow, I don't think I realized how nerdy I was. I was a member of the St. Louis User Group, a bulletin board, around 1986 and would also dialup PC Magazine to download utilities. I remember seeing some cloud-based computing ideas floating around about 1994, and was asked to sketch out the concept for website content around 1996 -- I found the transiton from text to the web pretty challenging at the time.


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## Semper Fidelis (Mar 27, 2014)

It's interesting to see how fluid the debate is. Some of the protocols were defined early on. Even html and web browsers were simply tools and the creation of a standard doesn't mean that there was widespread adoption.

In a real sense, one could point to the tipping point being when modems and the desire to be online went mainstream. Prior to that point it was more of a hobbyist thing.


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## Semper Fidelis (Mar 27, 2014)

jwithnell said:


> Wow, I don't think I realized how nerdy I was. I was a member of the St. Louis User Group, a bulletin board, around 1986 and would also dialup PC Magazine to download utilities. I remember seeing some cloud-based computing ideas floating around about 1994, and was asked to sketch out the concept for website content around 1996 -- I found the transiton from text to the web pretty challenging at the time.



I remember envying people who could afford computers back in the 80's. My High School had a computer lab and I taught myself Pascal but it was all on a floppy disk.

I remember moving to college in 1986 and my roommate used to use the phone line in our dorm to host a BBS. He was a bit of an odd duck. He had a newspaper that he published to himself that amounted to a diary.


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## Scottish Lass (Mar 27, 2014)

By 1993-1994, my high school had web access. It was a given at college that fall that we would use it for research, etc.


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## jwithnell (Mar 27, 2014)

Rich, I had an IBM PC 286 at work with dual floppies and a 1500-baud modem and my bosses didn't mind my messing with it after a while. They first put it on a desk across from mine in the box and told me not to touch it until tech showed up a week later to set it up and train me. I looked at that box, turned it around a few times, sniffed at it, took the top styrofoam layer off to look. That was a long week!

OK, in all fairness to the question in the OP: I have no idea.


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