---
title: Internet Origins
tags: [internet, arpanet, networking, tcp-ip]
status: active
confidence: high
created: 2026-04-08
sources:
  - file: public-domain/leiner-brief-history-internet-2009.txt
    hash: placeholder
    size: 0
    ingested: 2026-04-08
aliases: []
---

# Internet Origins

The Internet grew from ARPANET, a research network funded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the late 1960s, to a global infrastructure connecting billions of devices.

## ARPANET (1969)

The first ARPANET message was sent on October 29, 1969, between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. The network used packet switching — an idea developed independently by Paul Baran (RAND) and Donald Davies (NPL, UK) — rather than circuit switching used by telephone networks.

## TCP/IP (1974)

Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn published the foundational TCP/IP protocol specification in 1974. TCP/IP provided a universal language for heterogeneous networks. The [[unix-history]] BSD distribution was the first widely available OS to include TCP/IP (1983), driving adoption.

## DNS (1983)

The Domain Name System, designed by Paul Mockapetris, replaced the single HOSTS.TXT file with a distributed hierarchy, making the network scalable to millions of hosts.

## World Wide Web (1989)

Tim Berners-Lee at CERN proposed the World Wide Web in 1989: a hypertext system over the Internet using HTTP and HTML. The web made the Internet accessible to non-specialists and triggered exponential growth. Berners-Lee built on ideas traceable to [[alan-turing]]'s vision of universal machines.

## Relationship to Other Pages

The [[von-neumann-architecture]] computers that run Internet infrastructure all descend from the same stored-program model. The C language (see [[unix-history]]) underlies most Internet infrastructure software. The [[programming-languages-overview]] includes Python, JavaScript, and Go — languages that power the modern web.
