In 1995, just 14% of adults used the internet by 2000, almost half of Americans had gotten online.įor most of the internet’s early history, dial-up was the primary way for computers to connect with each other. adults said they used a personal computer at home, work or school, but few of them were connected to the internet.

Before then, graphics weren’t commonly mixed in with text.Īfter the introduction of Mosaic web browser in 1993 came what we now know as the “internet boom” of the 90s.

He distributed a proposal to his employers for a “distributed hypertext system,” which effectively created the World Wide Web as we know it today, along with ideas for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the web address (URL).Įxternal pull quote: “Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse.”īerners-Lee envisioned a system of text that interlinks with other text (hypertext) that could be viewed by “browsers.” It wasn’t until 1993, with the introduction of the graphical Mosaic web browser, that his World Wide Web became the most popular internet protocol by far.

Six years after the TCP/IP protocol was established, a researcher named Tim Berners-Lee had grown frustrated with how difficult it was to find information stored on different computers.

History of the internet