The Internet
The Internet grew out of funding by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), later renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to develop a communication system among government and academic computer-research laboratories. The first network component, ARPANET, became operational in October 1969. With only 15 nongovernment (university) sites included in ARPANET, the U.S. National Science Foundation decided to fund the construction and initial maintenance cost of a supplementary network, the Computer Science Network (CSNET).
Built in 1980, CSNET was made available, on a subscription basis, to a wide array of academic, government, and industry research labs. As the 1980s wore on, further networks were added. In North America there were (among others): BITNET (Because It’s Time Network) from IBM, UUCP (UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Protocol) from Bell Telephone, USENET (initially a connection between Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and the University of North Carolina and still the home system for the Internet’s many newsgroups), NSFNET (a high-speed National Science Foundation network connecting supercomputers), and CDNet (in Canada). In Europe several small academic networks were linked to the growing North American network.
All these various networks were able to communicate with one another because of two shared protocols: the Transmission-Control Protocol (TCP), which split large files into numerous small files, or packets, assigned sequencing and address information to each packet, and reassembled the packets into the original file after arrival at their final destination; and the Internet Protocol (IP), a hierarchical addressing system that controlled the routing of packets (which might take widely divergent paths before being reassembled).
What it took to turn a network of computers into something more was the idea of the hyperlink: computer code inside a document that would cause related documents to be fetched and displayed. The concept of hyperlinking was anticipated from the early to the middle decades of the 20th century—in Belgium by Paul Otlet and in the United States by Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, and, to some extent, Douglas Engelbart. Their yearning for some kind of system to link knowledge together, though, did not materialize until 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee of England and others at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) developed a protocol based on hypertext to make information distribution easier. In 1991 this culminated in the creation of the World Wide Web and its system of links among user-created pages. A team of programmers at the U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Urbana, Illinois, developed a program called a browser that made it easier to use the World Wide Web, and a spin-off company named Netscape Communications Corp. was founded to commercialize that technology.
Netscape was an enormous success. The Web grew exponentially, doubling the number of users and the number of sites every few months. Uniform resource locators (URLs) became part of daily life, and the use of electronic mail (email) became commonplace. Increasingly business took advantage of the Internet and adopted new forms of buying and selling in “cyberspace.” (Science fiction author William Gibson popularized this term in the early 1980s.) With Netscape so successful, Microsoft and other firms developed alternative Web browsers.
Originally created as a closed network for researchers, the Internet was suddenly a new public medium for information. It became the home of virtual shopping malls, bookstores, stockbrokers, newspapers, and entertainment. Schools were “getting connected” to the Internet, and children were learning to do research in novel ways. The combination of the Internet, email, and small and affordable computing and communication devices began to change many aspects of society.
It soon became apparent that new software was necessary to take advantage of the opportunities created by the Internet. Sun Microsystems, maker of powerful desktop computers known as workstations, invented a new object-oriented programming language called Java. Meeting the design needs of embedded and networked devices, this new language was aimed at making it possible to build applications that could be stored on one system but run on another after passing over a network. Alternatively, various parts of applications could be stored in different locations and moved to run in a single device. Java was one of the more effective ways to develop software for “smart cards,” plastic debit cards with embedded computer chips that could store and transfer electronic funds in place of cash.
E-commerce
Early enthusiasm over the potential profits from e-commerce led to massive cash investments and a “dot-com” boom-and-bust cycle in the 1990s. By the end of the decade, half of these businesses had failed, though certain successful categories of online business had been demonstrated, and most conventional businesses had established an online presence. Search and online advertising proved to be the most successful new business areas.
Some online businesses created niches that did not exist before. eBay, founded in 1995 as an online auction and shopping website, gave members the ability to set up their own stores online. Although sometimes criticized for not creating any new wealth or products, eBay made it possible for members to run small businesses from their homes without a large initial investment. eBay remained a popular site for auctioning and selling products and was joined by prominent online marketplaces such as Amazon, Etsy, and Alibaba.
Maintaining an Internet presence became common for conventional businesses during the 1990s and 2000s as they sought to reach out to a public that was increasingly active in online social communities. In addition to seeking some way of responding to the growing numbers of their customers who were sharing their experiences with company products and services online, companies discovered that many potential customers searched online for the best deals and the locations of nearby businesses.
Sites such as Pinterest helped online shoppers create “boards” to guide their purchasing endeavors. Some marketplaces started online and then built brick-and-mortar stores as a result of their online popularity. For example, the makeup brand Glossier, which started as the beauty website Into the Gloss, eventually transitioned to in-person establishments starting in 2016, creating stores with the website’s signature “clean-girl” aesthetic in cities across the United States, including New York and Chicago.
The growth of online business was accompanied, though, by a rise in cybercrime, particularly identity theft, in which a criminal might gain access to someone’s credit card or other identification and use it to make purchases. Computer viruses, a form of malicious software, were created by bad actors to extort money or steal people’s identities. Online black markets such as Silk Road, which appeared in 2011, facilitated drug trade and other illegal activity online.
(See also list of notable computer viruses and malware.)