History of the Internet
The history of the Internet dates back to the early development of communication networks. The idea of a computer network intended to allow general communication between users of various computers has developed through a large number of stages. The melting pot of developments brought together the network of networks[1] that we know as the Internet. This included both technological developments, as well as the merging together of existing network infrastructure and telecommunication systems.
The earliest versions of these ideas appeared in the late 1950s. Practical implementations of the concepts began during the late 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, technologies we would now recognize as the basis of the modern Internet began to spread over the globe. In the 1990s the introduction of the World Wide Web saw its use become commonplace.
The infrastructure of the Internet would spread across the globe, to create the modern world wide network of computers we know today. It spread throughout the western nations, and then begged a penetration into the developing countries, thus creating both unprecedented worldwide access to information and communications and a digital divide in access to this new infrastructure. The Internet would also go on to fundamentally alter and affect the economy of the world, including the economic implications of the dot-com bubble.

Prior to the widespread inter-networking that led to the Internet, most communication networks were limited by their nature to only allow communications between the stations on the network. Some networks would have gateways or bridges between them, but these bridges were often limited or built specifically for a single use. One prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe method, simply allowing its terminals to be connected via long leased lines. This method was used in the 1950s by Project RAND to support researchers such as Herbert Simon, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when collaborating across the continent with researchers in Santa Monica, California, on automated theorem proving and artificial intelligence.
A fundamental pioneer in the call for a global network, J.C.R. Licklider, grasped the need for a global network in his January 1960 paper, Man-Computer Symbiosis.

"a network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines" which provided "the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions. " -- J.C.R Licklider [2]
In October 1962, Licklider was appointed head of DARPA information processing office, and started to form an informal group within the United States Department of Defense's DARPA to further computer research. As part of the information processing offices role, three network terminals had been installed. One for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley and one for the Multics project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Licklider's need for inter-networking would be made evident by the problems this caused.
"For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them.
I said, oh, man, it's obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet." -- Robert W. Taylor, co-writer with Licklider of "The Computer as a Communications Device", in an interview with the New York Times.
At the core of the inter-networking problem lay the issue of connecting separate physical networks so they formed one logical network. During the 1960s, several groups worked on, and produced the concept of Packet Switching. Donald Davies (NPL), Paul Baran (Rand Corporation) and Leonard Kleinrock (MIT) are normally credited with the simultaneous invention. The common myth that the Internet was developed to survive nuclear attack has its roots in the early theories developed by RAND. Baran's research had approached packet switching from study of decentralisation to avoid combat damage risking the entire network.

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