A brief history of the computer

While the initial ARPANET linked just four nodes, it grew to 13 routers by the end of 1970 and continued to expand steadily. In 1973 the first UK node was added at University College London, and by 1981 there were 213 host computers worldwide. At the same time, the protocols and services used today began to emerge. The first use of email came in 1971, and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) appeared in 1973. At the end of 1974 the term ‘internet’ was first used as three Stanford University scientists published the specification of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). In 1983 ARPANET was converted to use TCP and Internet Protocol (IP), which still comprise the bulk of internet traffic today.

The next big step occurred in 1990. Tim Berners-Lee, an English research fellow at Switzerland’s CERN nuclear physics laboratory, began a project that would combine the internet and its Domain Name System (DNS) with the idea of hypertext. Working with Belgian Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee developed the world’s first worldwide web server, serving pages written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) from Christmas day that year. Incidentally, this ran on a simple workstation computer built by NeXT – a company founded by Steve Jobs after he was forced out of Apple in the mid-1980s.

While the web was originally used only within CERN, Berners-Lee publicised it in August 1991 and made his rudimentary server and browser software freely available for others to download. This decision was one of several that helped the web grow to its current ubiquity: it had been designed from the start to be platform-independent, suiting the variety of computers and operating systems at that time and since. Perhaps most significantly, in April 1993 Berners-Lee persuaded CERN to certify that the technology of the web was in the public domain – free for all to use.