Thehistory of the Internetbegins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts ofwide area networkingoriginated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France.[1]The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s, including for the development of theARPANETproject, directed byRobert Taylorand managed byLawrence Roberts. The first message was sent over the ARPANET in 1969 from computer science ProfessorLeonard Kleinrock's laboratory atUniversity of California, Los Angeles(UCLA) to the second network node atStanford Research Institute(SRI).

Packet switchingnetworks such as theNPL network, ARPANET,Tymnet,Merit Network,CYCLADES, andTelenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety ofcommunications protocols.[2]Donald Daviesfirst demonstrated packet switching in 1967 at theNational Physics Laboratory(NPL) in the UK, which became a testbed for UK research for almost two decades.[3][4]The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols forinternetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.

TheInternet protocol suite(TCP/IP) was developed byRobert E. KahnandVint Cerfin the 1970s and became the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET, incorporating concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed byLouis Pouzin. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with theNSFNETproject, which also created network access to thesupercomputersites in the United States from research and education organizations. CommercialInternet service providers(ISPs) began to emerge in the very late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990,[5]and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

In the 1980s, research at CERN in Switzerland by British computer scientistTim Berners-Leeresulted in theWorld Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network.[6]Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology, including the rise of near-instant communication byelectronic mail,instant messaging,voice over Internet Protocol(VoIP) telephone calls,two-way interactive video calls, and theWorld Wide Webwith itsdiscussion forums,blogs,social networking, andonline shoppingsites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such asJANETin the United Kingdom andInternet2in the United States. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-waytelecommunicationsnetworks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.[7]Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, andsocial networking. However, the future of the global internet may be shaped by regional differences in the world