The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet

protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It is an international network of
networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government packet
switched networks, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networkingtechnologies.
The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-
linked hypertextdocuments and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), the infrastructure to support
email, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and telephony.
The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States government in the
1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks.
[1]
While this work, together
with work in the United Kingdom and France, led toimportant precursor networks, they were not the
Internet. There is no consensus on the exact date when the modern Internet came into being, but
sometime in the early to mid-1980s is considered reasonable.
[2]
From that point, the network experienced
decades of sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers
were connected to it.
The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private
funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new
networking technologies, and the merger of many networks.
[3]
Though the Internet has been widely used
by academia since the 1980s, the commercialization of what was by the 1990s an international network
resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of
June 2012, more than 2.4 billion peopleover a third of the world's human populationhave used the
services of the Internet; approximately 100 times more people than were using it in 1995.
[4][5]
Internet use
grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s to early 2000s and from the late 1990s to present in
the developing world. In 1994 only 3% of American classrooms had access to the Internet while by 2002
92% did.
[6]