Over the last ten years, the Internet has become an indispensable tool for people living all over the world, and many rely on it to do business, communicate with friends and family, shop, learn, and be entertained. Not so long ago however, the Internet was in its earliest days and people didn’t have access to the high speeds and impressive technology they do now.
The story of the Internet begins in 1969 when computers at Stanford University and the University of California Los Angeles connected for the first time. Progress continued until 1971 when Ray Tomlinson developed the first email, and he is also credited with making the decision to use the famous “at” symbol with regards to the user and domain name.
Though first developed more than forty years ago, the Internet as people know it now did not start to take shape until the 1980s when the domain name system was created. By 1991 the first real webpage was created on the World Wide Web and pages started appearing in cyberspace.
By 1995, the Internet was commercialized and from that point on there has been rapid development with technologies both online and offline. Email services started to appear and stories from around the world broke on the Internet that might have otherwise not been heard. By the year 2000, the Internet had developed at an astounding rate and people were starting to use it to share files and sign onto social networking sites.
As the Internet developed, so did the way people connected to it. The first home users linked their PCs to the web using a slow dial-up connection, which made use of your home telephone line to connect to the Internet. This was slow and unreliable however, and when users were connected to the Internet, they couldn’t receive calls unless they also had a second phone line.
Over time, broadband gradually became the most common method of connecting to the Internet and allowed people to get online faster. You can still connect to broadband using a phone line, though many broadband users now connect through their cable services for fast Internet service.
Technology has also developed and now people use their laptops to connect to their wireless router that allows them to be on the Internet anywhere in the house. As computer tablets and mobile smart phones also become more popular, people are connecting to the Internet through their 3G networks on the go.
So what’s next for the Internet? Today, developers are constantly looking for ways to make websites more useful and Internet connections faster for users. Fibre Optic cables are allowing people to have broadband connections at lightning fast speeds, and it’s likely this service will soon become the norm for people using the Internet both at home and at work.
By signing up for fibre optic when it becomes available in your area, you can stay on top of the latest innovations on the Internet and enjoy super-fast connection speeds to watch movies, browse the web or shop online. Contact your local broadband supplier and ask them: “Can I get fibre optic broadband in my area?”, and you’ll be one step closer to zipping into the future of the web on the fastest Internet connection ever.