On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first man made satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. To Americans, this satellite was proof of something alarming: While the brightest scientists and engineers within the US had been designing bigger cars and better television sets, it seemed that the Soviets had been concentrating on less trivial means. After Sputnik’s launch, many Americans began to think more seriously about science and technology. Schools added courses on subjects like chemistry, physics, and calculus. Corporations took government grants and invested them in research and development. This resulted in the creation of departments such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and thus the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age technologies like rockets, weapons, and computers.
In 1965, another M.I.T. scientist developed the of sending information from one computer to a separate other, referred to as “packet switching.” Packet switching breaks data down into blocks being sent it to its destination. That way, each packet can take its route from place to put. Without packet switching, the government’s network would be susceptible to enemy attacks as a result of the telephone system. By 1969, only four computers were connected to the ARPAnet, but the network slowly began to grow during the 1970s.
Cerf’s protocol transformed online into a worldwide network. Throughout the 1980s, researchers and scientists used it to send files and data from one computer to a special. However, in 1991 the web changed again. That year, a programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that wasn't simply the thanks to sending files from one place to a special but was itself a “web” of data that anyone on the web could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the web that we all know today.
Since then, online has changed in some ways. In 1992, several students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed an aesthetic browser that they called Mosaic. Mosaic offered a user-friendly search on the Web: It allowed users to work out words and pictures on an equivalent page for the primary time and to navigate using scrollbars and clickable links. That same year, Congress decided that the online might be used for commercial purposes. As a result, companies of all types hurried to line up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use the web to sell goods on to customers. More recently, social networking sites like Facebook became a simple and understandable way for people of all ages to remain connected.