Why was the internet created?

In the 1950s and 60s, the United States was engaged in the Cold
War with the Soviet Union. Each country was working to increase its science and technology
capabilities in order to prevent nuclear attacks from the other, and also remain capable of
attacking the other should the situation devolve. At that time, computers were much larger and
more expensive than today's models. Mainframe computers took up entire rooms, and were
only able to do specific tasks. Researchers needed to be able to use the computers to perform
these tasks, but often had to travel long distances to find a computer to do a specific task. The
proposed solution was a way to connect the computers so they could speak to each other,
allowing researchers to share data without needing to travel to the location of the computer

How was the internet created? The problem with having computers communicate with each
other was that the method of transferring data from one computer to another, circuit switching,
took a long time and could easily be interrupted. All of the data had to be sent in one packet,
and if the connection was interrupted at any time during the process, none of the data would
get through. Scientists developed a different method called packet switching to overcome this
problem. With packet switching, the data could be broken up into smaller segments, and each
segment could be sent individually. The smaller amounts of data took less time to transfer, and
if an interruption occurred, some of the data would have made it through and the process
could be continued without having to start over completely. Once the data reached its
destination, the packets were able to be re-assembled into a complete packet.

he evolution of the internet continued from here. Packet switching allowed computers to
connect to each other over a network called ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency
Network. When did the internet start? In 1969, the first computers communicated over
ARPANET from UCLA to SRI in California. This initial network only had four nodes, but more
were added to allow research universities to share data and other resources. After ARPANET,
other networks were developed, but the individual networks could not communicate with each
other. In order to solve this problem, a set of rules called the Transmission Control Protocol and
Internet Protocol were developed, known as TCP/IP. These rules allowed for universal
communication across all networks, and made sure that packets sent over a network would be
delivered to the correct destination.

When was the internet introduced to the public? The World Wide Web was launched in 1991.
The Web allows users from any connected computer to locate resources and web pages using
Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs. The URL functions as an address that tells the computer
where to find the resource on the internet. The Web also uses HTTP, Hypertext Transfer
Protocol, to enable users to download linked resources, and HTML, Hypertext Markup
Language, the formatting language for web pages. Although people often refer to the Web as
the internet, it is actually a service that runs on the internet, not the internet itself.