In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, which triggered US President Eisenhower to launch ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to develop military science and technology and to regain the lead in the arms race. The idea of a countrywide communications network was born out of the research carried out here.
This research led to the development of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which went live in early October 1969. The first communications were between the University of California at Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute.
However, ARPANET did not interact well with other networks that did not share its own native protocol. This led to the development of the TCP/IP protocol by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, which could be layered over many different types of networks.
In August 1991, Oxford graduate Tim Berners-Lee launched his World Wide Web project, two years after he had developed the first few web pages at CERN in Switzerland.
By late 1994, there was increasing public interest in this application - previously limited to academic and technical use. By 1996 the word 'Internet' was a household name, and now millions of people around the world have access, enabling them to surf the Web, send and receive e-mails and communicate with anyone in the world with the click of a mouse.
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