history of web browsers essay

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The History of Web Browsers

World history is rife with epic power struggles, world-conquering tyrants, and heroic underdogs. The history of web browsers isn’t very different. University pioneers wrote simple software that sparked an information revolution, and battle for browser superiority and internet users.

Before Web Era

In 1950, computers took up whole rooms and were dumber than today’s pocket calculators. But progress was swift, and by 1960 they were able to run complex programs. Governments and universities across the globe thought it would be great if the machines could talk, nurturing collaboration and scientific breakthroughs.

ARPANET was the first successful networking project and in 1969 the first message was sent from the computer science lab at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to Stanford Research Institute (SRI), also in California.

That sparked a revolution in computer networking. New networks formed, connecting universities and research centers across the globe. But for the next 20 years, the internet wasn’t accessible to the public. It was restricted to university and government researchers, students, and private corporations. There were dozens of programs that could trade information over telephone lines, but none of them were easy to use. The real open internet, and the first web browser, wasn’t created until 1990.

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server and graphical web browser in 1990 while working at CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland. He called his new window into the internet “WorldWideWeb.” It was an easy-to-use graphical interface created for the NeXT computer. For the first time, text documents were linked together over a public network—the web as we know it.

A year later, Berners-Lee asked CERN math student Nicola Pellow to write the Line Mode Browser, a program for basic computer terminals.

By 1993, the web exploded. Universities, governments, and private corporations all saw opportunity in the open internet. Everyone needed new computer programs to access it. That year, Mosaic was created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign by computer scientist Marc Andreessen. It was the very first popular web browser and the early ancestor of Mozilla Firefox .

NCSA Mosaic ran on Windows computers, was easy to use, and gave anyone with a PC access to early web pages, chat rooms, and image libraries. The next year (1994), Andreessen founded Netscape and released Netscape Navigator to the public. It was wildly successful, and the first browser for the people. It was also the first move in a new kind of war for internet users.

The Browser Wars

By 1995, Netscape Navigator wasn’t the only way to get online. Computer software giant Microsoft licensed the old Mosaic code and built its own window to the web, Internet Explorer . The release sparked a war. Netscape and Microsoft worked feverishly to make new versions of their programs, each attempting to outdo the other with faster, better products.

Netscape created and released JavaScript, which gave websites powerful computing capabilities they never had before. (They also made the infamous <blink> tag .) Microsoft countered with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which became the standard for web page design.

Things got a little out of hand in 1997 when Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4.0. The team built a giant letter “e” and snuck it on the lawn of Netscape headquarters. The Netscape team promptly knocked the giant “e” over and put their own Mozilla dinosaur mascot on top of it .

Then Microsoft began shipping Internet Explorer with their Windows operating system. Within 4 years, it had 75% of the market and by 1999 it had 99% of the market. The company faced antitrust litigation over the move, and Netscape decided to open source its codebase and created the not-for-profit Mozilla , which went on to create and release Firefox in 2002. Realizing that having a browser monopoly wasn’t in the best interests of users and the open web, Firefox was created to provide choice for web users. By 2010, Mozilla Firefox and others had reduced Internet Explorer’s market share to 50% .

Other competitors emerged during the late ‘90s and early 2000s, including Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome. Microsoft Edge replaced Internet Explorer with the release of Windows 10 in 2015.

Browsing the Web Today

Today there are just a handful of ways to access the internet. Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari and Opera are the main competitors. Mobile devices have emerged during the past decade as the preferred way to access the internet. Today, most internet users only use mobile browsers and applications to get online. Mobile versions of the major browsers are available for iOS and Android devices. While these apps are very useful for specific purposes, they only provide limited access to the web.

In the future, the web will likely stray further from its hypertext roots to become a vast sea of interactive experiences. Virtual reality has been on the horizon for decades (at least since the release of Lawnmower Man in 1992 and the Nintendo Virtual Boy in 1995), but the web may finally bring it to the masses. Firefox now has support for WebVR and A-Frame, which let developers quickly and easily build virtual reality websites. Most modern mobile devices support WebVR, and can easily be used as headsets with simple cardboard cases. A 3D virtual reality web like the one imagined by science fiction author Neal Stephenson may be just around the corner. If that’s the case, the web browser itself may completely disappear and become a true window into another world.

Whatever the future of the web holds, Mozilla and Firefox will be there for users, ensuring that they have powerful tools to experience the web and all it has to offer. The web is for everyone, and everyone should have control of their online experience. That’s why we give Firefox tools to protect user privacy and we never sell user data to advertisers.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
• https://home.cern/topics/birth-web
• https://www.zdnet.com/article/before-the-web-the-internet-in-1991/

Take control of your browser.

CERN Accelerating science

• short history web

A short history of the Web

The Web has grown to revolutionise communications worldwide

Where the Web was born

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather the focal point for an extensive community that includes more than 17 000 scientists from over 100 countries. Although they typically spend some time on the CERN site, the scientists usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Reliable communication tools are therefore essential.

The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the evolving technologies of computers, data networks and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.

How the Web began

Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and his second proposal in May 1990 . Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a management proposal in November 1990. This outlined the principal concepts and it defined important terms behind the Web. The document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" in which a "web" of "hypertext documents" could be viewed by “browsers”.

By the end of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had the first Web server and browser up and running at CERN, demonstrating his ideas. He developed the code for his Web server on a NeXT computer. To prevent it being accidentally switched off, the computer had a hand-written label in red ink: " This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!! "

info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first website and Web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first Web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

This page contained links to information about the WWW project itself, including a description of hypertext, technical details for creating a Web server, and links to other Web servers as they became available.

The WWW design allowed easy access to existing information and an early web page linked to information useful to CERN scientists (e.g. the CERN phone book and guides for using CERN’s central computers). A search facility relied on keywords - there were no search engines in the early years.

Berners-Lee’s original Web browser running on NeXT computers showed his vision and had many of the features of current Web browsers. In addition, it included the ability to modify pages from directly inside the browser – the first Web editing capability. This screenshot shows the browser running on a NeXT computer in 1993 .

The Web extends

Only a few users had access to a NeXT computer platform on which the first browser ran, but development soon started on a simpler, ‘line-mode’ browser , which could run on any system. It was written by Nicola Pellow during her student work placement at CERN.

In 1991, Berners-Lee released his WWW software. It included the ‘line-mode’ browser, Web server software and a library for developers. In March 1991, the software became available to colleagues using CERN computers. A few months later, in August 1991, he announced the WWW software on Internet newsgroups and interest in the project spread around the world.

Going global

Thanks to the efforts of Paul Kunz and Louise Addis, the first Web server in the US came online in December 1991, once again in a particle physics laboratory: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, which was sophisticated but available only on NeXT machines. The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the internet for other developers to join in. Several individuals wrote browsers, mostly for the X-Window System. Notable among these were MIDAS by Tony Johnson from SLAC, Viola by Pei Wei from technical publisher O'Reilly Books, and Erwise by Finnish students from Helsinki University of Technology.

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of its Mosaic browser. This software ran in the X Window System environment, popular in the research community, and offered friendly window-based interaction. Shortly afterwards the NCSA released versions also for the PC and Macintosh environments. The existence of reliable user-friendly browsers on these popular computers had an immediate impact on the spread of the WWW. The European Commission approved its first web project (WISE) at the end of the same year, with CERN as one of the partners. On 30 April 1993, CERN made the source code of WorldWideWeb available on a royalty-free basis, making it free software. By late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers, and the WWW accounted for 1% of internet traffic, which seemed a lot in those days (the rest was remote access, e-mail and file transfer). 1994 was the “Year of the Web”. Initiated by Robert Cailliau, the First International World Wide Web conference was held at CERN in May. It was attended by 380 users and developers , and was hailed as the “Woodstock of the Web”.

As 1994 progressed, stories about the Web hit the media. A second conference, attended by 1300 people, was held in the US in October, organised by the NCSA and the newly-formed International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2). By the end of 1994, the Web had 10 000 servers - 2000 of which were commercial - and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added.

Open standards

An essential point was that the web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system. In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: “WebCore”. The goal of the project was to form an international consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1994, Berners-Lee left CERN to join MIT and founded the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Meanwhile, with approval of the LHC project clearly in sight, CERN decided that further web development was an activity beyond the laboratory’s primary mission. A new European partner for W3C was needed.

The European Commission turned to the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Controls (INRIA), to take over CERN's role. In April 1995, INRIA became the first European W3C host, followed by Keio University of Japan (Shonan Fujisawa Campus) in Asia in 1996. In 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics) took over the role of European W3C Host from INRIA. In 2013, W3C announced Beihang University as the fourth Host. In September 2018, there were more than 400 member organisations from around the world.

History of the Web

This chapter dives into the history of the web itself: where it came from, and how the web and browsers have evolved to date. This history is not exhaustive; For example, there is nothing much about SGML or other predecessors to HTML. (Except in this footnote!) the focus is the key events and ideas that led to the web, and the goals and motivations of its inventors.

The Memex concept

An influential early exploration of how computers might revolutionize information is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush entitled As We May Think . This essay envisioned a machine called a Memex that helps an individual human see and explore all the information in the world. It was described in terms of the microfilm screen technology of the time, but its purpose and concept has some clear similarities to the web as we know it today, even if the user interface and technology details differ.

The web is at its core organized around the Memex-like goal of representing and displaying information , providing a way for humans to effectively learn and explore. The collective knowledge and wisdom of the species long ago exceeded the capacity of a single mind, organization, library, country, culture, group or language. However, while we as humans cannot possibly know even a tiny fraction of what it is possible to know, we can use technology to learn more efficiently than before, and, in particular , to quickly access information we need to learn, remember, or recall. Consider this imagined research session described by Vannevar Bush–one that is remarkably similar to how we sometimes use the web:

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. […] He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items.

Computers, and the internet, allow us to process and store the information we want. But it is the web that helps us organize and find that information, that knowledge, making it useful. Google’s well-known mission statement to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” is almost exactly the same. This is not a coincidence—the search engine concept is inherently connected to the web, and was inspired by the web’s design and antecedents.

As We May Think highlighted two features of the memex: information record lookup, and associations between related records. In fact, the essay emphasizes the importance of the latter—we learn by making previously unknown connections between known things :

When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically. […] The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.

By “association”, Bush meant a trail of thought leading from one record to the next via a human-curated link. He imagined not just a universal library, but a universal way to record the results of what we learn.

The web emerges

The concept of hypertext documents linked by hyperlinks was invented in 1964-65 by Project Xanadu , led by Ted Nelson. He was inspired by the long tradition of citation and criticism in academic and literary communities. The Project Xanadu research papers were heavily motivated by this use case. Hypertext is text that is marked up with hyperlinks to other text. A successor called the Hypertext Editing System was the first to introduce the back button, which all browsers now have. Since the system only had text, the “button” was itself text. Sound familiar? A web page is hypertext, and links between web pages are hyperlinks. The format for writing web pages is HTML, which is short for HyperText Markup Language. The protocol for loading web pages is HTTP, which is short for HyperText Transfer Protocol.

Independently of Project Xanadu, the first hyperlink system appeared for scrolling within a single document; it was later generalized to linking between multiple documents. And just like those original systems, the web has linking within documents as well as between them. For example, the URL:

http://browser.engineering/history.html#the-web-emerges

refers to a document called “ history.html ” and specifically to the element in it with the name “ the-web-emerges ”: this section. Visiting that URL will load this chapter and scroll to this section.

This work also formed and inspired one of the key parts of Douglas Engelbart’s mother of all demos , perhaps the most influential technology demonstration in the history of computing. That demo not only showcased the key concepts of the web, but also introduced the computer mouse and graphical user interface, both of which are of course central components of a browser UI. That demo went beyond even this. There are some parts of it that have not yet been realized in any computer system. Watch it!

There is of course a very direct connection between this research and the document-URL-hyperlink setup of the web, which built on the hypertext idea and applied it in practice. The HyperTIES system, for example, had highlighted hyperlinks and was used to develop the world’s first electronically published academic journal, the 1988 issue of the Communications of the ACM . Tim Berners-Lee cites that 1988 issue as inspiration for the World Wide Web, Nowadays the World Wide Web is called just “the web”, or “the web ecosystem”—ecosystem being another way to capture the same concept as “World Wide”. The original wording lives on in the “www” in many website domain names. in which he joined the link concept with the availability of the internet, thus realizing many of the original goals of all this work from previous decades. Just as the web itself is a realization of previous ambitions and dreams, today we strive to realize the vision laid out by the web. (No, it’s not done yet!)

The word “hyperlink” may have been coined in 1987, in connection with the HyperCard system on Apple computers. This system was also one of the first, or perhaps the first, to introduce the concept of augmenting hypertext with scripts that handle user events like clicks and perform actions that enhance the UI–just like JavaScript on a web page! It also had graphical UI elements, not just text, unlike most predecessors.

In 1989-1990, the first web browser (named “WorldWideWeb”) and web server (named “ httpd ”, for “HTTP Daemon” according to UNIX naming conventions) were born, written by Tim Berners-Lee. Interestingly, while that browser’s capabilities were in some ways inferior to the browser you will implement in this book, No CSS! No JS! Not even images! in other ways they go beyond the capabilities available even in modern browsers. For example, the first browser included the concept of an index page meant for searching within a site (vestiges of which exist today in the “index.html” convention when a URL path ends in /”), and had a WYSIWYG web page editor (the “contenteditable” HTML attribute and “html()” method on DOM elements have similar semantic behavior, but built-in file saving is gone). Today, the index is replaced with a search engine, and web page editors as a concept are somewhat obsolete due to the highly dynamic nature of today’s web page rendering. On December 20, 1990 the first web page was created. The browser we will implement in this book is easily able to render this web page, even today. Also, as you can see clearly, that web page has not been updated in the meantime, and retains its original aesthetics! In 1991, Berners-Lee advertised his browser and the concept on the alt.hypertext Usenet group .

Berners-Lee’s Brief History of the Web highlights a number of other key factors that led to the World Wide Web becoming the web we know today. One key factor was its decentralized nature, which he describes as arising from the academic culture of CERN , where he worked. The decentralized nature of the web is a key feature that distinguishes it from many systems that came before or after, and his explanation of it is worth quoting here (highlight is mine):

There was clearly a need for something like Enquire Enquire was a predecessor web-like database system, also written by Berners-Lee. but accessible to everyone. I wanted it to scale so that if two people started to use it independently, and later started to work together, they could start linking together their information without making any other changes . This was the concept of the web.

This quote captures one of the key value propositions of the web: its decentralized nature. The web was successful for several reasons, but they all had to do with decentralization:

Because there was no gatekeeper to doing anything, it was easy for anyone, even novices, to make simple web pages and publish them.

Because pages were identified simply by URLs, traffic could come to the web from outside sources like email, social networking, and search engines. Further, compatibilty between sites and the power of hyperlinks created network effects that further strengthened the effect of hyperlinks from within the web.

Because the web was outside the control of any one entity—and kept that way via standards organizations—it avoided the problems of monopoly control and manipulation.

The first widely distributed browser may have been ViolaWWW ; this browser also pioneered multiple interesting features such as applets and images. It was in turn the inspiration for NCSA Mosaic , which launched in 1993. One of the two original authors of Mosaic went on to co-found Netscape, which built Netscape Navigator , the first commercial browser , By commercial I mean built by a for-profit entity. Netscape’s early versions were also not free software—you had to buy them from a store. They cost about $50. which launched in 1994. Feeling threatened , Microsoft launched Internet Explorer in 1995 and soon bundled it with Windows 95.

The era of the “first browser war” ensued: a competition between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer . There were also other browsers with smaller market shares; one notable example is Opera . The WebKit project began in 1999; Safari and Chromium -based browsers, such as Chrome and newer versions of Edge , descend from this codebase. Likewise, the Gecko rendering engine was originally developed by Netscape starting in 1997; the Firefox browser is descended from that codebase. During the first browser war, nearly all of the core features of this book’s simple browser were added, including CSS, DOM, and JavaScript.

The “second browser war”, which according to Wikipedia was 2004-2017 , was fought between a variety of browsers, in particular Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Initially, Safari and Chrome used the same rendering engine, but Chrome forked into Blink in 2013, which Microsoft Edge adopted by 2020. The second browser war saw the development of many features of the modern web, including widespread use of AJAX requests, HTML5 features like <canvas> , and a huge explosion in third-party JavaScript libraries and frameworks.

Web standards

In parallel with these developments was another, equally important, one—the standardization of web APIs. In October 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded to provide oversight and standards for web features. Prior to this point, browsers would often introduce new HTML elements or APIs, and competing browsers would have to copy them. With a standards organization, those elements and APIs could subsequently be agreed upon and documented in specifications. (These days, an initial discussion, design and specification precedes any new feature.) Later on, the HTML specification ended up moving to a different standards body called the WHATWG , but CSS and other features are still standardized at the W3C. JavaScript is standardized at TC39 (“Technical Committee 39” at ECMA , yet another standards body). HTTP is standardized by the IETF . The point is that the standards process set up in the mid-nineties is still with us.

In the first years of the web, it was not so clear that browsers would remain standard and that one browser might not end up “winning” and becoming another proprietary software platform. There are multiple reasons this didn’t happen, among them the egalitarian ethos of the computing community and the presence and strength of the W3C. Another important reason was the networked nature of the web, and therefore the necessity for web developers to make sure their pages worked correctly in most or all of the browsers (otherwise they would lose customers), leading them to avoid proprietary extensions. On the contrary, browsers worked hard to carefully reproduce each other’s undocumented behaviors—even bugs—to make sure they continued supporting the whole web.

There never really was a point where any browser openly attempted to break away from the standard, despite fears that that might happen. Perhaps the closest the web came to fragmenting was with the late-90s introduction of features for DHTML —early versions of the Document Object Model you’ll learn about in this book. Netscape and Internet Explorer at first had incompatible implementations of these features, and it took years, development of a common specification, and significant pressure campaigns on the browsers before standardization was achieved. You can read about this story in much more depth here . Instead, intense competition for market share was channeled into very fast innovation and an ever-expanding set of APIs and capabilities for the web, which we nowadays refer to as the web platform, not just the “World Wide Web”. This recognizes the fact that the web is no longer a document viewing mechanism, but has evolved into a fully realized computing platform and ecosystem. There have even been operating systems built around the web! Examples include webOS , which powered some Palm smartphones, Firefox OS (that today lives on in KaiOS -based phones), and ChromeOS , which is a desktop operating system. All of these OSes are based on using the Web as the UI layer for all applications, with some JavaScript-exposed APIs on top for system integration.

Given the outcomes—multiple competing browsers and well-developed standards—it is in retrospect not that relevant which browser “won” or “lost” each of the browser “wars”. In each cases the web won, because it gained users and grew in capability.

Open source

Another important and interesting outcome of the second browser war was that all mainstream browsers today Examples of Chromium-based browsers include Chrome, Edge, Opera (which switched to Chromium from the Presto engine in 2013), Samsung Internet, Yandex Browser, UC Browser and Brave. In addition, there are many “embedded” browsers, based on one or another of the three engines, for a wide variety of automobiles, phones, TVs and other electronic devices. are based on three open-source web rendering / JavaScript engines : Chromium, Gecko and WebKit. The JavaScript engines are actually in different repositories (as are various other sub-components), and can and do get used outside the browser as JavaScript virtual machines. One important application is the use of V8 to power node.js . However, each of the three rendering engines does have a corresponding JavaScript implementation, so conflating the two is reasonable. Since Chromium and WebKit have a common ancestral codebase, while Gecko is an open-source descendant of Netscape, all three date back to the 1990s—almost to the beginning of the web.

This is not an accident, and in fact tells us something quite interesting about the most cost-effective way to implement a rendering engine based on a commodity set of platform APIs. For example, it’s common for independent developers, not paid by the company nominally controlling the browser, to contribute code and features. There are even companies and individuals that specialize in implementing browser features! It’s also common for features in one browser to copy code from another. And every major browser being open source feeds back into the standards process, reinforcing the web’s decentralized nature.

In summary, the history went like this:

Basic research was performed into the ways to represent and explore information.

Once the necessary technology became mature enough, the web proper was proposed and implemented.

The web became popular quite quickly, and many browsers appeared in order to capitalize on the web’s opportunity.

Standards organizations were introduced in order to negotiate between the browsers and avoid proprietary control.

Competition between browsers grew their power and complexity at a rapid pace.

Browsers appeared on all devices and operating systems, from desktop to mobile to embedded.

Eventually, all web rendering engines became open source, as a recognition of their being a shared effort larger than any single entity.

The web has come a long way! But one thing seems clear: it isn’t done yet.

What comes next : Based on what you learned about how the web came about and took its current form, what trends do you predict for its future evolution? For example, do you think it’ll compete effectively against other non-web technologies and platforms?

What became of the original ideas? The way the web works in practice is significantly different than the memex; one key difference is that there is no built-in way for the user of the web to add links between pages or notate them. Why do you think this is? Can you think of other goals from the original work that remain unrealized?

• The Story of the Web: A History Of Internet Browsers

It would not be absurd to say that of all inventions ever created by humankind – the wheel, the steam engine, the light bulb, and so on – the most significant is the internet. Like these other technologies, it has ushered in societal change, but unlike them, this change has been almost instant, and it has had a profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives.

To grasp this, consider that just one hundred years ago, essential parts of our daily lives – smartphones, computers, the internet – were beyond even the most creative imagination. Now, we often struggle to comprehend life without them. How this transformation started and how it is playing out today is a fascinating story that helps us piece together the world we live in.

Embedded in the story of how the internet changed our lives forever is the history of the web browser. This is because it was the web browser that helped take the internet out of the academic world and into the mainstream, and once people got a taste of its power, they couldn't stop, leading to a full-on revolution.

Today, the browser remains every bit as relevant; in fact, many people have come to associate the internet and their web browser as the same thing (which they're not). This makes it interesting and important to study web browsers' history, the computer programs that serve as the building blocks for our modern age.

Brief History of the Internet

While the web browser as we know it today didn't come onto the scene until around 1990, it had been in the making for several decades, albeit indirectly, as part of the overall effort to develop the internet.

This means we can trace the origin of the browser to the early days of the internet, which many people do not know takes us all the way back to the 1950s. 

At this point, the internet was a defense project with the primary objective of creating a communications network that would allow people to communicate without using phone lines. During the 1950s (the beginning of the Cold War), people were convinced these means of communication were unreliable because they could be attacked and wiped out, which just means that the internet, an era-defining tool, was in part rooted in people's paranoia about commies. 

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Cold War fear began dying down. Computer scientists continued to build on the idea of creating computer networks that would help these devices communicate with one another over long distances . The main issue was that the many different research teams working on these networks were creating separate networks that couldn't communicate with one another. This severely limited their functionality and became a focus of the entire group working on these projects.

In the 1970s, the term " internetworking " was used to describe the purpose of creating a common internet protocol that would make it easier for computers to read information from other networks. It laid the groundwork for not only the web browser but also the term "internet."

By the 1980s, researchers were getting very close to creating this "internet" that would make a truly global network possible, setting the stage for the invention of the browser and the beginning of a new era.

The History of the Web Browser

WorldWideWeb: The First Web Browser 

In the early 1980s, a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, while working at the Swiss-based European Organization of Nuclear Research (known as CERN for its letters in French), created a computer program called Enquire . The program was designed to make it easier for the many different people working at CERN to share information.

Up until this point, information was stored on many different computers, making it incredibly difficult to find things unless you knew exactly where to look. Enquire helped address this by creating files that could easily be found and linked to one another using hypertext. But this program ran on CERN's proprietary operating system, which means few people were able to really access it and use it. The idea died when Berners-Lee left CERN but was revived when he came back in 1989.

Seeing that the problem of information management at CERN had not been solved since his last stint at the institute, Berners-Lee set out to solve it once again. This time, thanks to other developments in computer science, Berners-Lee was able to create something that would become remarkably useful: the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web is essentially an information storage system in which data is kept on servers and accessed when a web browser seeks out its Universal Resource Locator (URL). It was a system that allowed all the information (at the time at CERN but later in the world) to be stored in one place and easily accessed by anyone who wanted it. One significant innovation was the use of hypertext, which was displayed on the screen and would take the user directly to another resource stored on the server.

This idea, which Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau received approval to develop in 1990, led to the creation of the first web browser: WorldWideWeb. A new era was officially born.

What is a Web Browser?

You might be wondering what exactly a web browser is now that you know the first web browser came into existence in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN.

In short, it's a computer program, and its purpose is to display and retrieve information. It does this by using URLs, which are assigned to each data set (web page) stored on the webserver.

So, this means that when you type something into your browser, you're actually entering an address, which the browser will use to get the information you want to see. Another key function of a browser is interpreting computer code and presenting it to you in an understandable way.

The web browser is so remarkable in part for its simplicity for the end-user. It's a complicated program, but anyone can use it, meaning the "internet" could now be accessed by the masses, which would quickly bring on rapid change in society.

The Early Browsers

The WorldWideWeb browser created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 was a game-changer. Still, it wasn't going to be the browser that would help take the internet mainstream, mainly because it ran on the NeXT operating system, which was not widely used. However, subsequent versions of the browser would help make it more accessible and would lead to mass downloads and the first internet boom in history. 

Here's a summary of some of the early web browsers and their contributions to what we have today.

In 1991, just one year after the creation of WorldWideWeb, two college students from Finland created Erwise. It was the first browser to use a graphical interface , meaning it could display not only text but also images, which was a big deal. 

Users could also search for words on a page, a feature never before seen in a web browser, and it could also handle multiple fonts, underline hyperlinks, and open more than one window at a time. All very basic features now but that were very innovative at the time.

However, while Erwise was undoubtedly an exciting program, it never really took off, primarily due to a lack of funding available in Finland at the time. But despite its failure as a business, it helped lay the groundwork for the next few browsers, which would bring things along to the point of explosion.

It was a small project which hit the market in 1992 but did not achieve success largely because it worked only on Mac computers and not PCs. The development of ViolaWWW was important to the history of web browsers because it was the first that allowed developers to embed scripts in the browser page, which laid the groundwork for Java-script. 

Later in the 1990s, Java-script would play a huge role in the growth of the web as it made web pages more functional and more interactive, helping make the internet more appealing to the masses and leading to its eventual widespread adaptation.

Between 1990, when Berners-Lee invented WorldWideWeb, and 1993, the web browser went from a mere idea to a tool for revolution. While anyone on the ground floor of this phenomenon could see the potential of this program, it had yet to make it into the mainstream. 

Enter Mosaic.

Mosaic was similar to the browsers that came before it, but it had a few extra things going for it that helped it stand out from the crowd and become the first browser to be used en masse. 

First, Mosaic introduced the <IMG> tag allowing for inline images. This meant web pages created for Mosaic could be made to look like any other form of traditional media people would be used to seeing, a vital component for convincing people to start reading more from a screen. 

It also allowed for things such as bookmarks, video clips, sound, forms, and history files, all of which had never been seen before with a browser. 

Mosaic was also super easy to download – anyone could do it – and it had one feature that no other browser had ever had – it worked on both Macs and PCs. 

All of these features turned Mosaic into the rising star of the internet world. Combined with the growth in internet service providers (ISPs) – those in charge of building the infrastructure needed to create the web – the release of Mosaic was the first domino to fall in our digital revolution, ushering in a new era. 

To give you an idea, consider that when Mosaic was released, there were fewer than 100 websites. By 1995, there were more than 10,000 , and by 2000, there were more than 10,000,000. 

This growth wasn't all the result of Mosaic, and it was only made possible by the tremendous efforts to expand infrastructure and increase access. But Mosaic allowed developers to do more with a website than ever before, specifically in terms of adding graphics, images, and scripts, meaning that online content could be made more accessible and marketable. Blogs grew considerably during this time as people grabbed onto the idea that anyone with a connection could publish content on the internet. 

Netscape Navigator

In 1994, when Mosaic was far and away the most popular browser out there, Marc Andreesen, teaming up with colleague Jim Clark, launched a company that would create a browser better than Mosaic, seize the market, make them rich, and change history. 

Their first browser, confusingly, was called the Mosaic Netscape 0.9. Still, it had nothing to do with the original Mosaic (this name was often used in a generic sense to refer to a browser's ability to work on multiple platforms; it fit together across different operating systems like a mosaic). 

However, shortly after, Andreesen and Clark dropped the term mosaic and settled on Netscape as both the name of their company and browser. It quickly became the industry leader thanks to features such as Java-script and partial-screen loading, which allowed users to begin reading information on a page even when it wasn't fully loaded. A novel idea at the time that greatly improved the web experience. 

All of this helped Netscape capture well over half the browser market share. When the company went public in 1995, it was valued at almost $3 billion , more than double the estimate. This success not only helped Netscape improve its standing and turn its founders into celebrities, but it also shook the computing world and opened the door for the consumer web revolution, which helped usher in the digital age in which we now live. 

It's also worth noting that the Netscape IPO also helped exacerbate the growing dot-com bubble; investors were pouring money into internet companies without knowing much about them. This inflated the market, eventually leading to a crash. Nevertheless, the growth and success of Netscape certainly changed things and is an important moment in the history of the web browser. 

The Browser Wars: The Rise of Internet Explorer

Netscape's initial success demonstrated to those working in the world of computers and the internet that things had changed forever, and this struck fear into the industry's most important players at the time. One such company was a Seattle-based firm known as Microsoft. 

Netscape was a threat to Microsoft, which by the late 1990s had developed its own browser – Internet Explorer – but which was widely considered to be an inferior product. Because of its cross-platform functionality, one could use Netscape on a Windows PC or a Mac, or any other device for that matter. 

This lead many to speculate that the days of the operating system were over. Computers would run through browsers, which could work on any machine, democratizing the software industry and reducing its considerable barriers to entry. 

However, Microsoft had built its empire selling its proprietary operating system, Windows, and so saw this development, spearheaded by companies like Netscape, as a threat. So, it sought to beat out the upstart company and reshape the web's development in its own image. And it did this by pouring the massive resources at Microsoft's disposal into improving its browser (which in 1995 and 1996 was considered to be vastly inferior to Netscape).

This period in which Microsoft set out to defeat and destroy Netscape became known as the Browser Wars, and it radically shaped browser history. To be more specific, in 1996, Netscape controlled over 80 percent of the browser market . By the end of 1998, it controlled around 40 percent, and in 1999, it was replaced by Internet Explorer. This rapid decline led to Netscape's selling out to AOL in 2000, which continued to distribute the browser but oversaw its continued demise until its eventual extinction in 2008.

Microsoft managed to so quickly turn the tables in the browser industry by investing heavily in their product so that it would be as good as if not better than Netscape. They also leveraged the rest of their business to help with the proliferation of its browser. More specifically, Windows computers were released with Internet Explorer (Microsoft's browser) already installed, which allowed it to get a leg up on the market and grow, eventually leading to its victory in the browser world. 

Modern Browsers

By 2003, Microsoft's Internet Explorer controlled over 92 percent of the market , representing a complete reversal of the situation in 1995. However, while Microsoft had managed to completely take over the browser market in less than ten years, competition would soon emerge from elsewhere, once again reshaping the history of web browsers. 

Mozilla Firefox

In the early 2000s, after Netscape became part of AOL, the Mozilla Foundation was formed to preserve the original Netscape code and provide an open-sourced, independent browser to those who wanted one. In the early days, Mozilla did not take much from Internet Explorer's market share. Still, throughout the 2000s, as Internet Explorer began to lag behind once again, Mozilla carved out more than 30 percent. However, by 2009, Mozilla's growth peaked, and it would stop competing against Internet Explorer as a new player entered the scene to change things dramatically. 

Google Chrome

After Microsoft rose to dominance in the late 1990s and brought companies like Netscape to their knees, it seemed as though the history of the browser had come to an end. However, as had been the case after its initial release, Internet Explorer was becoming an inferior product. An opportunity opened for a new company to step in and take over the browser market. What better company to do so than the rising star of the internet world – Google. 

Google launched its proprietary browser – Chrome – in 2008, after years of development spearheaded by programmers who had gotten their start with Mozilla. By the end of 2012, just four years after its launch, Google Chrome replaced Internet Explorer as the most popular browser thanks to its ease-of-use, cross-platform functionality, speed, and special features related to tabs and bookmarks. 

Over the next few years, Chrome continued to dominate the browser market and does so as of writing. In 2020, Chrome controls more than 60 percent of the browser market. It appears this will stay this way for the foreseeable future, but if the rest of browser history teaches us anything, it's there is always someone waiting in the wings to take your spot.

Apple Safari

In the early 2000s, likely following Microsoft's move of attaching a browser to its operating system, Apple released Safari, a browser designed specifically for Mac. For a time, it was a popular choice for Apple users, but it never made any sort of significant dent in the overall market. It continues to be fairly popular in some niches to this day. Safari has around 20 percent of the market and is the second most popular browser out there today.

Microsoft Edge

Internet Explorer's popularity dwindled throughout the late 2000s, primarily because it became slow and out of date, and Microsoft found itself on the outside looking into the browser world. Not wanting to continue to miss out, the company set out to fix the problem but found one key issue was that the name "Internet Explorer" had become synonymous with an inferior browser. This is interesting, when we consider just ten years prior, that browser was at the top of the game (although supporters of Netscape in the Browser Wars would say the product was always worse but forced into the market thanks to Microsoft's financial influence). 

As a result, to try and get back into the game, Microsoft had to re-brand, and it did so by releasing Edge, which is the most current version of Microsoft's browser. It has received plenty of good reviews, but it might be too late for Microsoft as Edge. Despite being launched in 2015, it is still not one of the top five browsers in use today.

This example, if nothing else, shows us how quickly a company can fall from public favor, especially when it comes to products like web browsers, which people use on a near-constant basis. 

A retelling of the history of web browsers would not be entirely complete if we didn't mention the TOR browser. TOR was developed alongside The Onion Router (TOR) project, which seeks to establish a web in which people can operate under complete anonymity; most of you might know this as the "Dark Web."

The TOR Browser gives one access to this side of the internet, and although anything but mainstream, its existence points to an issue in modern browsers: privacy. Since people use web browsers for so much, there is tons of data to be mined. Up until now, no one has seemed to care all that much, but who knows what the future holds. 

The Future of the Web Browser

The history of the web browser is a short but tumultuous one. After first breaking onto the scene in 1990 thanks to a small research project carried out by Tim Berners-Lee, the browser has become one of the mainstays of modern life. It's hard to imagine where we would be without it, but it's even harder to imagine what's coming next. 

As mentioned, the issue of privacy is becoming one that people are beginning to care increasingly about as our lives continue to move online. The world's most popular browser – Chrome – is developed by a company – Google – that is notorious for espousing personal privacy while simultaneously tracking everything you do to make money off you from advertising. 

Does this mean we're poised for yet another chapter in the history of the web browser? Only time will tell, but if history is a harbinger of things to come, we can expect nothing that exists today to remain the same tomorrow.

InternetAdvisor Team

We are passionate about aggregating large, accurate data sets and providing it all to our users in an easy-to-use format. Simply put, shopping is easier for the consumer when he/she knows all available options. We are not beholden to any single provider and therefore are dedicated to transparency and giving you unbiased information on all providers.

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A short history of the internet

Published: 3 December 2020

Read about the history of the internet, from its 1950s origins to the World Wide Web’s explosion in popularity in the late 1990s and the ‘dotcom bubble’.

The origins of the internet

The origins of the internet are rooted in the USA of the 1950s. The Cold War was at its height and huge tensions existed between North America and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers were in possession of deadly nuclear weapons, and people lived in fear of long-range surprise attacks. The US realised it needed a communications system that could not be affected by a Soviet nuclear attack.

At this time, computers were large, expensive machines exclusively used by military scientists and university staff.

These machines were powerful but limited in numbers, and researchers grew increasingly frustrated: they required access to the technology, but had to travel great distances to use it.

To solve this problem, researchers started ‘time-sharing’. This meant that users could simultaneously access a mainframe computer through a series of terminals, although individually they had only a fraction of the computer’s actual power at their command.

The difficulty of using such systems led various scientists, engineers and organisations to research the possibility of a large-scale computer network.

Who invented the internet?

No one person invented the internet. When networking technology was first developed, a number of scientists and engineers brought their research together to create the ARPANET . Later, other inventors’ creations paved the way for the web as we know it today.

• PAUL BARAN (1926–2011)

An engineer whose work overlapped with ARPA’s research. In 1959 he joined an American think tank, the RAND Corporation, and was asked to research how the US Air Force could keep control of its fleet if a nuclear attack ever happened. In 1964 Baran proposed a communication network with no central command point. If one point was destroyed, all surviving points would still be able to communicate with each other. He called this a distributed network.

• LAWRENCE ROBERTS (1937–2018)

Chief scientist at ARPA, responsible for developing computer networks. Paul Baran’s idea appealed to Roberts, and he began to work on the creation of a distributed network.

• LEONARD KLEINROCK (1934–)

An American scientist who worked towards the creation of a distributed network alongside Lawrence Roberts.

• DONALD DAVIES (1924–2000)

A British scientist who, at the same time as Roberts and Kleinrock, was developing similar technology at the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex.

• BOB KAHN (1938–) AND VINT CERF (1943–)

American computer scientists who developed TCP/IP , the set of protocols that governs how data moves through a network. This helped the ARPANET evolve into the internet we use today. Vint Cerf is credited with the first written use of the word ‘internet’.

When asked to explain my role in the creation of the internet, I generally use the example of a city. I helped to build the roads—the infrastructure that gets things from point A to point B. —Vint Cerf, 2007

• PAUL MOCKAPETRIS (1948–) AND JON POSTEL (1943–98)

Inventors of DNS , the ‘phone book of the internet’.

• TIM BERNERS-LEE (1955–)

Creator of the World Wide Web who developed many of the principles we still use today, such as HTML, HTTP, URLs and web browsers.

There was no “Eureka!” moment. It was not like the legendary apple falling on Newton’s head to demonstrate the concept of gravity. Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realisation that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realisations from many sides. —Tim Berners-Lee,  Weaving the Web , 1999

• MARC ANDREESSEN (1971–)

Inventor of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser.

The first use of a computer network

In 1965, Lawrence Roberts made two separate computers in different places ‘talk’ to each other for the first time. This experimental link used a telephone line with an acoustically coupled modem, and transferred digital data using packets.

When the first packet-switching network was developed, Leonard Kleinrock was the first person to use it to send a message. He used a computer at UCLA to send a message to a computer at Stanford. Kleinrock tried to type ‘login’ but the system crashed after the letters ‘L’ and ‘O’ had appeared on the Stanford monitor.

A second attempt proved successful and more messages were exchanged between the two sites. The ARPANET was born.

The life and death of the ARPANET

President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958, bringing together some of the best scientific minds in the country. Their aim was to help American military technology stay ahead of its enemies and prevent surprises, such as the launch of the satellite Sputnik 1, happening again. Among ARPA’s projects was a remit to test the feasibility of a large-scale computer network.

Lawrence Roberts was responsible for developing computer networks at ARPA, working with scientist Leonard Kleinrock. Roberts was the first person to connect two computers. When the first packet-switching network was developed in 1969, Kleinrock successfully used it to send messages to another site, and the ARPA Network—or ARPANET—was born.

Once ARPANET was up and running, it quickly expanded. By 1973, 30 academic, military and research institutions had joined the network, connecting locations including Hawaii, Norway and the UK.

As ARPANET grew, a set of rules for handling data packets needed to be put in place. In 1974, computer scientists Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf invented a new method called transmission-control protocol, popularly known as TCP/IP , which essentially allowed computers to speak the same language.

After the introduction of TCP/IP, ARPANET quickly grew to become a global interconnected network of networks, or ‘Internet’.

The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.

What is packet switching?

‘Packet switching’ is a method of splitting and sending data. A computer file is effectively broken up into thousands of small segments called ‘packets’—each typically around 1500 bytes—distributed across a network, and then reordered back into a single file at their destination. The packet switching method is very reliable and allows data to be sent securely, even over damaged networks; it also uses bandwidth very efficiently and doesn’t need a single dedicated link, like a telephone call does.

The world’s first packet-switching computer network was produced in 1969. Computers at four American universities were connected using separate minicomputers known as ‘Interface Message Processors’ or ‘IMPs’. The IMPs acted as gateways for the packets and have since evolved into what we now call ‘routers’.

Packet switching is the basis on which the internet still works today.

What is TCP/IP?

TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. The term is used to describe a set of protocols that govern how data moves through a network.

After the creation of ARPANET, more networks of computers began to join the network, and the need arose for an agreed set of rules for handling data. In 1974 two American computer scientists, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, proposed a new method that involved sending data packets in a digital envelope or ‘datagram’. The address on the datagram can be read by any computer, but only the final host machine can open the envelope and read the message inside.

Kahn and Cerf called this method transmission-control protocol (TCP). TCP allowed computers to speak the same language, and it helped the ARPANET to grow into a global interconnected network of networks, an example of ‘internetworking’—internet for short.

IP stands for Internet Protocol and, when combined with TCP, helps internet traffic find its destination. Every device connected to the internet is given a unique IP number. Known as an IP address, the number can be used to find the location of any internet-connected device in the world.

What is DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System. It is the internet’s equivalent of a phone book, and converts hard-to-remember IP addresses into simple names.

In the early 1980s, cheaper technology and the appearance of desktop computers allowed the rapid development of local area networks (LANs). An increase in the amount of computers on the network made it difficult to keep track of all the different IP addresses.

This problem was solved by the introduction of the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983. DNS was invented by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel at the University of Southern California. It was one of the innovations that paved the way for the World Wide Web.

The beginnings of email

Email was a rapid—but unintended—consequence of the growth of ARPANET. As the network increased in popularity and scope, users quickly realised the potential of the network as a tool for sending messages between different ARPANET computers.

Ray Tomlinson , an American computer programmer, is responsible for electronic mail as we know it today. He introduced the idea that the destination of a message should be indicated using the @ symbol, which was first used to distinguish between the individual user’s name and that of their computer (i.e. user@computer). When DNS was introduced, this was extended to  [email protected] .

Early email users sent personal messages and began mailing lists on specific topics. One of the first big mailing lists was ‘SF-LOVERS’ for science fiction fans.

The development of email showed how the network had transformed. Rather than a way of accessing expensive computing power, it had started to become a place to communicate, gossip and make friends.

Early home computers

From the 1970s onwards, the home computer industry grew exponentially. The uptake of home computers was not necessarily driven by users’ needs or a computer’s functionality; early machines could actually do relatively little. The appeal to the consumer was the idea of becoming part of the ‘Information Revolution’. Computers were embedded with the rhetoric of the future and learning, but in most cases this meant learning to program so that people could actually make the technology do something, such as play games.

More information about collection object

The growth of the internet, 1985–95.

The invention of DNS, the common use of TCP/IP and the popularity of email caused an explosion of activity on the internet. Between 1986 and 1987, the network grew from 2,000 hosts to 30,000. People were now using the internet to send messages to each other, read news and swap files. However, advanced knowledge of computing was still needed to dial in to the system and use it effectively, and there was still no agreement on the way that documents on the network were formatted.

The internet needed to be easier to use. An answer to the problem appeared in 1989 when a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his employer, CERN, the international particle-research laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee proposed a new way of structuring and linking all the information available on CERN’s computer network that made it quick and easy to access. His concept for a ‘web of information’ would ultimately become the World Wide Web.

The launch of the Mosaic browser in 1993 opened up the web to a new audience of non-academics, and people started to discover how easy it was to create their own HTML web pages. Consequently, the number of websites grew from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996.

By 1995 the internet and the World Wide Web were established phenomena: Netscape Navigator, which was the most popular browser at the time, had around 10 million global users.

How is the World Wide Web different from the internet?

The terms ‘World Wide Web’ and ‘internet’ are often confused. The internet is the networking infrastructure that connects devices together, while the World Wide Web is a way of accessing information through the medium of the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of a ‘web of information’ in 1989. It relied on ‘hyperlinks’ to connect documents together. Written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a hyperlink can point to any other HTML page or file that sits on top of the internet.

In 1990, Berners-Lee developed Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and designed the Universal Resource Identifier (URI) system. HTTP is the language computers use to communicate HTML documents over the internet, and the URI, also known as a URL, provides a unique address where the pages can be easily found.

Berners-Lee also created a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. He called this ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’.

On 6 August 1991 the code to create more web pages and the software to view them was made freely available on the internet. Computer enthusiasts around the world began setting up their own websites. Berners-Lee’s vision of a free, global and shared information space began to take shape.

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. Tim Berners-Lee (1998)

The introduction of web browsers

Tim Berners-Lee was the first to create a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. He called this ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’. However, this original application had limited use as it could only be used on advanced  NeXT machines . A simplified version that could run on any computer was created by Nicola Pellow, a maths student who worked alongside Berners-Lee at CERN.

In 1993, Marc Andreessen, an American student in Illinois, launched a new browser called Mosaic. Created at the National Center for Super-computing Applications (NCSA), Mosaic was easy to download and install, worked on many different computers and provided simple point-and-click access to the World Wide Web. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images next to text, rather than in a separate window.

Mosaic’s simplicity opened the web up to a new audience, and caused an explosion of activity on the internet, with the number of websites growing from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996.

In 1994 Andreesen formed Netscape Communications with entrepreneur Jim Clark. They led the company to create Netscape Navigator, a widely used internet browser that at the time was faster and more sophisticated than any of the competition. By 1995, Navigator had around 10 million global users.

Early ecommerce and the ‘dotcom bubble’

The enormous excitement surrounding the internet led to a massive boom in new technology shares between 1998 and 2000. This became known as the ‘dotcom bubble’.

The claim was that world industry was experiencing a ‘new economic paradigm’, the likes of which had never been experienced before. Investors in the stock market began to believe the hype and threw themselves into a frenzy of activity. The internet was thought to be central to economic growth, while share prices implied that new online companies carried the seeds for expansion. This led in turn to a feverish level of investment and unrealistic expectations about rates of return.

We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for—quite literally—billions of people on the planet. We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. —Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden,  Wired , July 1997

Venture capitalists flourished and many companies were founded on dubious business plans. The most notorious of these was the high fashion online retailer Boo.com, which spent its way through $200 million, only to collapse within six months of its website going live.

However, despite their failure, such businesses helped cause a fundamental transformation and left an important legacy. Many investors lost money, but they also helped to finance the new system and lay the groundwork for future success in ecommerce.

Further reading

• Brief History of the Internet , Internet Society
• Internet History 1962 to 1992 , Computer History Museum
• Internet Pioneers , ibiblio
• Tim Berners-Lee biography , World Wide Web Consortium
• The World Wide Web: A global information space , Science Museum
• John Naughton,  A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet , 1999
• Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon,  Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet , 1996
• Tim Berners-Lee,  Weaving the Web , 1999

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World Wide Web Timeline

Since its founding in 1989, the World Wide Web has touched the lives of billions of people around the world and fundamentally changed how we connect with others, the nature of our work, how we discover and share news and new ideas, how we entertain ourselves and how communities form and function.

The timeline below is the beginning of an effort to capture both the major milestones and small moments that have shaped the Web since 1989. It is a living document that we will update with your contributions. To suggest an item to add to the timeline, please  message us .

The World Wide Web begins as a CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) project called ENQUIRE, initiated by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee . Other names considered for the project include “The Information Mesh” and “The Mine of Information.”

• AOL launches its Instant Messenger chat service and begins welcoming users with the iconic greeting “You’ve got mail!”

• 42% of American adults have used a computer.
• World’s first website and server  go live at CERN , running on Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer, which bears the message “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!”
• Tim Berners-Lee develops the first Web browser WorldWideWeb .
• Archie , the first tool to search the internet is developed by McGill University student Alan Emtage.

Researchers rig up a live shot of a coffee pot so they could tell from their computer screens when a fresh pot had been brewed. Later connected to the World Wide Web, it becomes the first webcam.

• The term “ surfing the internet ” is coined and popularized.

Tim Berners-Lee posts the first photo , of the band “Les Horribles Cernettes,” on the Web.

• The line-mode browser launches . It is the first readily accessible browser for the World Wide Web.
• CERN places its World Wide Web technology in the public domain , donating it to the world.
• The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) releases Mosaic 1.0 , the first web browser to become popular with the general public. “The web as we know it begins to flourish,” Wired later writes .
• The New York Times writes about the Web browser Mosaic and the World Wide Web for the first time. “Think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age.”
• Marc Andreessen  proposes  the IMG HTML tag to allow the display of images on the Web.

• 11 million American households are “ equipped to ride the information superhighway .”

One of the first known Web purchases takes place: a pepperoni pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese from Pizza Hut .

• President Bill Clinton’s White House comes online .
• Yahoo! is created  by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. They originally named the site “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.”

The first banner ad for hotwired.com appears, with the text “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? —> YOU WILL.”

• Two lawyers post the first massive, commercial spam message  with the subject “Green Card Lottery -Final One?”
• 18 million American homes are now online, but only 3% of online users have ever signed on to the World Wide Web .

Amazon.com opens for business , billing itself as the “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.”

• Craig Newmark starts craigslist , originally an email list of San Francisco events.
• Match.com, the first online dating site, launches .
• Entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar launches eBay , originally named “AuctionWeb.” He lists the first item for sale: a broken laser pointer . A collector purchases it for $14.83.
• Chris Lamprecht becomes the first person to be banned from the internet by judicial decree. “I told the judge computers were my life,” Lamprecht later recalled.
• Netscape IPO starts the gold rush mentality for Web startups.
• Microsoft releases Windows 95  and the first version of Internet Explorer .
• Web hosting service GeoCities launches.
• 77% of online users send or receive e-mail at least once every few weeks, up from 65% in 1995.

Nokia releases the Nokia 9000 Communicator , the first cellphone with internet capabilities.

• HoTMaiL launches as  one of the world’s first Webmail services , its name a reference to the HTML internet language used to build webpages.
• The Dancing Baby , a 3D animation, becomes one of the first viral videos.

• Netflix  launches as a company  that sends DVDs to homes via mail.
• Go Daddy launches as Jomax Technologies.
• Google.com  registers as a domain .
• Jorn Barger  becomes the first person to use the term “Weblog”  to describe the list of links on his website.

20% of Americans get news from the internet at least once a week, up from 4% in 1995.

• AOL launches AOL 4.0 and inundates American homes with CD-ROM mailers . AOL membership jumps from 8 million to 16 million members.
• The Internet Corporations for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) takes over responsibility for the coordination of the global internet’s systems of unique identifiers.
• Oxford Dictionary adds “spam” and “digerati.”
• Pew Research Center tests online polling  with mixed results.
• MP3 downloading service Napster launches, overloading high-speed networks in college dormitories. Many colleges ban the service and it is later shut down for enabling the illegal sharing of music files.
• Yahoo! acquires GeoCities for $3.6 billion.
• 43% of internet users say they would miss going online “a lot,” up from 32% in 1995.
• 78% of internet users who download music  don’t think it’s stealing  to save music files to their computer hard drives.

40 million Americans – or 48% of internet users – have purchased a product online .

• 32% of internet users (over 30 million people)  sent e-greeting cards to loved ones and friends.

The NASDAQ hits a record high of 5,048, before plunging by 78%  during the dot com bust. A 2001 survey finds 71% of Americans who had heard about the dot com troubles  believe a major cause of the dot-com woes is that investors were eager to make a lot of money and took at lot of risks.

• AOL acquires Time Warner for $165 billion.  New York Times  says “it could be the internet companies that do the buying and the old media that sell out.”
• Only 3% of internet users say they got most of their information about the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath from the internet.

The average internet user spends  83 minutes  online.

• Jimmy Wales launches  Wikipedia . Users write over 20,000 encyclopedia entries in the first year.
• 55 million people now go online from work  and 44% of those who have internet access at work say their use of the internet helps them do their jobs.

Social networking site Friendster.com launches, but is quickly  overtaken by Facebook .

• Microsoft launches Xbox Live , its online multiplayer gaming service.”Critics scoffed at the idea, noting how uncommon broadband connections were at the time.”

Apple  launches the iTunes Music Store  with 200,000 songs at 99¢ each. The store sells one million songs in its first week.

• Skype, a voice-over-IP calling and instant messaging service, launches and quickly becomes a verb, as in “Skype me.”
• Professional networking site LinkedIn launches.
• MySpace.com  is founded  and quickly adopted by musicians seeking to share music and build their fan bases.
• President George W. Bush signs the CAN-SPAM Act into law , establishing the first national standards for the sending of commercial email.
• WordPress blog publishing system created.
• 11% of American internet users follow the returns on election night online. One-in-ten internet users sign up for political email newsletters and news alerts during the campaign.

Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launches thefacebook.com. 1,200 Harvard students sign up within the first 24 hours . Facebook goes on to become the world’s biggest social networking site, with over a billion users worldwide.

• Google starts trading on the NASDAQ at $85 a share .
• Social news website Digg launches. Digg users vote to “digg up” links that they like and “bury” down those they don’t.
• Mozilla releases Firefox 1.0 .
• Massively multiplayer online role-playing game(MMORPG)  World of Warcraft launches.
• 8% of adult American internet users say they participate in sports fantasy leagues online.
• 9% of internet users (13 million Americans)  went online to donate money  to the victims of Gulf Coast hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

About one-in-six online adults – 25 million people – have sold something online .

• Broadband connections surpass dial-up connections.
• Community news site  Reddit  is founded. It is bought by Conde Nast a year later for $20 million.
• Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. buys MySpace for $580 million and  sells it  in 2011 for $35 million.
• YouTube is founded on Valentine’s Day. The first video , an explanation of what’s cool about elephants, is uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim on April 23. Google acquires the company a year later.

• The late Senator Ted Stevens describes the internet as “a series of tubes,” during a 2006 speech on net neutrality. His quote is  mocked by Boing Boing  and the  Daily Show  and inspires YouTube remixes.
• Google acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion . YouTube founders Chad and Steve announce the Google acquisition in a  video recorded in a parking lot : “The king of search and the king of video have gotten together.”
• Twitter launches. Founder Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet: “just setting up my twttr”

just setting up my twttr — jack (@jack) March 21, 2006

• 36% of American online adults consult Wikipedia .
• 32% of Americans have at least heard about Hillary and Bill Clinton’s video parody of the final episode of “The Sopranos” and 19% have actually seen it.
• 36% of Americans say they would have a hard time giving up their Blackberry or other wireless email device, up from 6% in 2002.

• Estonia becomes the world’s first country to use internet voting in a parliamentary election .
• Three-quarters (74%) of internet users – or 55% of the entire U.S. adult population — say they went online during the presidential election to take part in or get news and information about the campaign.
• 19% of cellphone owners say they have gone online with their phones .
• Google releases the Chrome Web browser .
• HTML5  is introduced.
• Deal-of-the-day website Groupon launches.
• Apple launches its App Store  with 552 applications.
• Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion , but the two companies  cannot agree on a purchase price .
• World of Warcraft hits 11.5 million subscribers worldwide. Guinness Book of World Records names it the most popular MMORPG .
• 69% of Americans turn to the internet to cope with and understand the recession .
• Microsoft’s  Bing  search engine launches.
• Twitter raises $98 million from investors,  valuing the company at a whopping $1 billion .
• The Web is transfixed by the tale of a six-year-old boy  flying over Colorado  in a weather balloon. The story later proves to be a hoax .
• Kanye West’s VMA outburst sparks an internet meme .
• Viral videos like  David After Dentist , Susan Boyle , Baby Dancing to Beyonce , and the  JK Wedding Entrance Dance  launch ordinary people into newfound Web stardom.

• 35% of adults have cell phones with apps , but only two-thirds actually use them.
• Social photo-sharing sites Pinterest and Instagram launch.
• Wikileaks collaborates with major media organizations to release U.S. diplomatic cables .
• Ex-Facebook employees launch user-based question and answer site Quora .
• 15% of social media-using teens say they have been the target of online meanness .
• 68% of all Americans say the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to communicate with members .
• LinkedIn reaches 100 million users and debuts on NYSE .
• Microsoft buys Skype  for $8.5 billion.
• Google+ launches .
• Young Egyptians use the hashtags #Egypt and #Jan25 on Twitter to spread the word about the Egyptian Revolution.  The government responds by shutting down the internet .
• Rebecca Black’s “ Friday ” becomes a YouTube sensation .
• 66% of internet users use Facebook and 12% use Instagram .
• Among the 13% of US adults who made a financial contribution to a presidential candidate, 50% donated online or via email .
• Facebook reaches 1 billion monthly active users, making it the dominant social network worldwide. Some analysts start calling it “ Facebookistan .” The company buys Instagram  for $1 billion and  debuts on NASDAQ at $38 a share.
• South Korean music star PSY’s “ Gangnam Style ” video surpasses Justin Bieber’s “ Baby ” as the most viewed video ever, with over 800 million views.
• Ecommerce sales top $1 trillion worldwide .
• The Internet Society founds the Internet Hall of Fame  to “celebrate people who bring the internet to life.”
• A majority (56%) of Americans  now own a smartphone of some kind .
• 51% of U.S. adults bank online .

Former CIA employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden turns over thousands of classified documents to media organizations, exposing a top-secret government data surveillance program.

• Apple says app store downloads  top 40 billion , with 20 billion in 2012 alone.
• Twitter files for its long-awaited IPO . Shares soar 73% above their IPO price of $26 a share on the first day of trading.

https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/378261932148416512

• 45% of internet users ages 18-29 in serious relationships say the internet has had an impact on their relationship .
• Facebook buys messaging app Whatsapp for $19 billion.

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The Invention of the Internet

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 28, 2019 | Original: July 30, 2010

Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the internet has no single “inventor.” Instead, it has evolved over time. The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and share data with one another. Today, we use the internet for almost everything, and for many people it would be impossible to imagine life without it.

The Sputnik Scare

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first manmade satellite into orbit. The satellite, known as Sputnik, did not do much: It relayed blips and bleeps from its radio transmitters as it circled the Earth. Still, to many Americans, the beach-ball-sized Sputnik was proof of something alarming: While the brightest scientists and engineers in the United States had been designing bigger cars and better television sets, it seemed, the Soviets had been focusing on less frivolous things—and they were going to win the Cold War because of it.

Did you know? Today, almost one-third of the world’s 6.8 billion people use the internet regularly.

After Sputnik’s launch, many Americans began to think more seriously about science and technology. Schools added courses on subjects like chemistry, physics and calculus. Corporations took government grants and invested them in scientific research and development. And the federal government itself formed new agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age technologies such as rockets, weapons and computers.

The Birth of the ARPAnet

Scientists and military experts were especially concerned about what might happen in the event of a Soviet attack on the nation’s telephone system. Just one missile, they feared, could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible. 

In 1962, a scientist from M.I.T. and ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider proposed a solution to this problem: a “galactic network” of computers that could talk to one another. Such a network would enable government leaders to communicate even if the Soviets destroyed the telephone system.

In 1965, another M.I.T. scientist developed a way of sending information from one computer to another that he called “packet switching.” Packet switching breaks data down into blocks, or packets, before sending it to its destination. That way, each packet can take its own route from place to place. Without packet switching, the government’s computer network—now known as the ARPAnet—would have been just as vulnerable to enemy attacks as the phone system.

On October 29, 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first message: a “node-to-node” communication from one computer to another. (The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one was the size of a small house.) The message—“LOGIN”—was short and simple, but it crashed the fledgling ARPA network anyway: The Stanford computer only received the note’s first two letters.

The Network Grows

By the end of 1969, just four computers were connected to the ARPAnet, but the network grew steadily during the 1970s. 

In 1971, it added the University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet, and two years later it added networks at London’s University College and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. As packet-switched computer networks multiplied, however, it became more difficult for them to integrate into a single worldwide “internet.”

By the end of the 1970s, a computer scientist named Vinton Cerf had begun to solve this problem by developing a way for all of the computers on all of the world’s mini-networks to communicate with one another. He called his invention “Transmission Control Protocol,” or TCP. (Later, he added an additional protocol, known as “Internet Protocol.” The acronym we use to refer to these today is TCP/IP.) One writer describes Cerf’s protocol as “the ‘handshake’ that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space.”

The World Wide Web

Cerf’s protocol transformed the internet into a worldwide network. Throughout the 1980s, researchers and scientists used it to send files and data from one computer to another. However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Since then, the internet has changed in many ways. In 1992, a group of students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed a sophisticated browser that they called Mosaic. (It later became Netscape.) Mosaic offered a user-friendly way to search the Web: It allowed users to see words and pictures on the same page for the first time and to navigate using scrollbars and clickable links. 

That same year, Congress decided that the Web could be used for commercial purposes. As a result, companies of all kinds hurried to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use the internet to sell goods directly to customers. More recently, social networking sites like Facebook have become a popular way for people of all ages to stay connected.

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Let’s begin with a question, So, what is the Internet? The answer must sound very easy however, most people won’t be able to answer it. The Internet is a global network of interconnected computer networks that communicate with each other over the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) . It is a network of networks made up of private, public, academic, and government networks ranging from local to global in extent and connected by a diverse set of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.

The Internet holds a huge range of information as well as services like Email, Voice-over IP, Television, Games, File Sharing, Shopping, etc.

History of the Internet

Initially in the 1960s, the Internet was started as a medium for sharing information with government researchers. During the time computers were larger in size and were immovable. In case anyone had to access the information stored in any computer, they had to travel to the location of the computer or the other way to have magnetic computer tapes that could be transported through the postal system of that time.

Alongside, Escalated Cold War played a major role in the creation of the internet . The Soviet Union had deployed the Sputnik satellite which led the Defense Department of the United States to examine the possibilities of communicating information despite nuclear. The situation resulted in the development of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) , which, later on, evolved into the Internet . In the initial days, ARPANET became a huge success with restricted participation where it was accessible to academic and research institutions that had contracts with the US Defense Department. The scenario led to the formation of new networks in order to facilitate the need for information sharing with other people.

Earlier there wasn’t any standard mechanism for the computer networks that would enable them to communicate with each other. Transfer Control Protocol (TCP/IP) which was developed in 1970, was adopted as a new communication protocol for ARPANET in 1983. The technology enabled various computers on different networks to communicate with each other and this is how the Internet was officially born on January 1, 1983.

An Overview From 1985 to 1995

The invention of DNS , the widespread usage of TCP/IP, and the popularity of email all contributed to an increase in internet activity. Between 1986 and 1987, the network expanded from 2,000 to 30,000 hosts. People were increasingly using the internet to send messages, read news, and exchange files. However, sophisticated computing knowledge was still required to dial into the system and use it efficiently, and there was still no agreement on how documents on the network should be formatted.

The internet needed to be more user-friendly. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee , a British computer scientist, proposed a solution to his employer, CERN, the international particle-research facility in Geneva, Switzerland. He proposed a new method for organizing and connecting all of the information available on CERN’s computer network, making it quick and easy to access. His idea for a “network of information” evolved into the World Wide Web.

The release of the Mosaic browser in 1993 introduced the web to a new non-academic audience, and people began to learn how simple it was to make their own HTML websites. As a result, the number of websites increased from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the beginning of 1996.

By 1995, the internet and the World Wide Web had become an established phenomenon, with over 10 million global users using the Netscape Navigator. The Netscape Navigator was the most popular browser at that point in time.

What is DNS?

DNS is short for Domain Name System . It functions as the internet’s version of a phone book, converting difficult-to-remember IP addresses into simple names. Cheaper technology and the introduction of desktop computers in the early 1980s facilitated the rapid development of local area networks (LANs). As the number of machines on the network grew, it became impossible to keep track of all the different IP addresses.

The development of the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983 solved this problem. DNS was invented at the University of Southern California by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel. It was one of the breakthrough inventions that helped in paving the way for the World Wide Web.

TCP/IP or Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol

TCP/IP is an acronym that stands for Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol. The terms refer to a set of protocols that regulate how data flows via a network.

Following the development of ARPANET , new computer networks began to join the network, prompting the need for an agreed-upon set of data-handling standards. Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, two American computer scientists, in the year 1974 invented a new way of transmitting data packets in a digital envelope known as ‘Datagram’. Any computer can read the datagram’s address, but only the ultimate host system can open the envelope and read the message within.

This technology was dubbed the transmission-control protocol by Kahn and Cerf. TCP enabled computers to communicate in the same language, allowing the ARPANET to evolve into a global interconnected network of networks, an example of ‘internetworking’—written as the “internet” in short.

IP stands for Internet Protocol and when paired with TCP, aids in the routing of internet data. Every internet-connected device is assigned a unique IP address. The number, known as an IP address, can be used to find out the location of any internet-connected device.

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History Of Internet Short Essay

The Internet has a long and complex history. Its origins can be traced back to the early days of computer networking in the 1950s. In the decades since then, the Internet has undergone numerous changes and developments, transforming from a simple network of computers into the global phenomenon we know today.

The Internet first came into existence in the late 1960s, with the development of a computer network called ARPANET. This network was designed to allow government agencies and universities to share information and resources. ARPANET quickly grew beyond its original purpose, and by the early 1970s it had become a major research tool for scientists all over the world.

In the 1980s, a new generation of computer networks emerged, based on the TCP/IP protocol. These networks, which included the Internet, allowed for greater communication and collaboration between users. The Internet soon became a popular tool for business and commerce, and by the 1990s it had become a staple of everyday life.

Today, the Internet is used by billions of people all over the world. It has become a vital part of our economy and our society, and shows no signs of slowing down. Thanks to its origins in ARPANET, the Internet is one of the most resilient and adaptable technologies ever created. Its future is bright, and we can expect to see even more amazing things from it in the years to come.

Within our culture, there has been a revolution that rivals that of the Industrial Revolution. The Technological Revolution is credited with launching this change. The Internet is at the forefront of this transformation. This information haven has all types of thrills, surprises, and even love for some people. Today, everyone in society knows what the Internet is and where it came from, yet for others it’s still unclear What is the Internet and how did it develop? A strange strategic problem arose thirty years ago for RAND Corp., America’s leading Cold War think-tank.

The solution they came up with was a ‘network of networks’, a concept that would eventually be known as the Internet. Although the Internet was originally designed for military purposes, it soon became apparent that this new technology had much wider applications.

In the early 1980s, US universities began to connect to the Internet, followed by research laboratories and government departments. By the end of the decade, there were over 100,000 computers connected to the Internet worldwide. The Internet had become a truly global phenomenon.

The Internet has come a long way since those early days. It is now possible to use the Internet for everything from booking airline tickets to listening to music and watching movies. The Internet has become an essential part of our lives, and it is hard to imagine a world without it.

The infrastructure required in a post-nuclear America would need to include a command-and-control network that was connected from city to city, state to state, and base to base. Regardless of how well that network is armored or protected, its switches and wiring will always be vulnerable to the effects of atomic bombs.

A nuclear assault would destroy any network imaginable. Also, how would the network be managed and directed? An aggressor’s missile would target any centre of authority, whether it is a central authority or a network headquarters. RAND considered this macabre conundrum in great military secrecy and devised an innovative answer.

They would create a distributed network, one that had no central authority and no single point of failure. This would be the world’s first information network—an idea that would later come to be known as the Internet. RAND’s engineers designed a distributed network based on a new technology called packet-switching.

In packet-switching, messages were chopped into small pieces, or packets, and sent through the network independently. This allowed messages to take any number of possible routes from sender to receiver, circumventing any damage that might be done to individual sections of the network.

The first test of RAND’s design was in 1957, when a team of graduate students at UCLA sent a message from one computer to another at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The message read simply: “Lo.” It was the first ever Internet communication.

In the 1960s, packet-switching technology was adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense for use in its own communications network, which came to be known as ARPANET. ARPANET’s original purpose was to link together military computers and share information between them. But as more and more universities and research laboratories were connected to ARPANET, it became clear that this new network had much wider implications. It was becoming a place where people could communicate and collaborate in ways never before possible.

In 1974, two computer scientists at Stanford University, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, laid the foundations for what would become the Internet’s governing protocol—the set of rules that allow different computer networks to talk to each other. Cerf and Kahn’s protocol, called TCP/IP, is still in use today.

In the 1980s, the Internet began to spread beyond the borders of the United States. Companies and individuals in other countries saw the potential of this new technology and started to build their own networks that connected to the Internet.

The 1990s saw a massive expansion of the Internet, as more and more people got online and new websites and services were created. The Internet was becoming a part of everyday life, used for everything from shopping to banking to staying in touch with friends and family.

The 21st century has seen even more dramatic changes, as the Internet has moved beyond the realm of computers and into the world of mobile devices. Nowadays, we access the Internet not just through our desktop or laptop computers, but also through our smartphones and tablets. And with the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we’re using the Internet to share photos, videos, and thoughts with friends and family all over the world.

The Internet has come a long way since its humble beginnings in post-nuclear America. It’s been used for everything from military communication to online shopping to staying in touch with friends and family. And it’s only going to keep growing and evolving in the years to come. So whatever your favorite Internet activity is, there’s no doubt that it will be even better in the future. Thanks for being part of the Internet’s History!

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Pew: Quarter of web pages vanished in past decade

Luckily we have the wayback machine.

The web is melting away like so many glaciers these days.

A report published by the Pew Research Center finds that digital decay is erasing online news, Twitter/X posts, and web links.

The Pew team - Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy, and Gonzalo Rivero - found that 25 percent of web pages that existed at some point between 2013 and October 2023 no longer function. As for older web pages that existed before 2013, 38 percent can no longer be accessed. As a point of comparison, about 8 percent of web pages from 2023 have disappeared.

The study, based on an analysis of web crawl data from Common Crawl , some 50,000 Wikipedia articles, and Twitter/X posts from last year, confirms longstanding concerns about the ephemeral nature of digital content.

"The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages," Pew says. "But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view."

This has particular implications for news and government websites. A sample of half a million news pages from Common Crawl in March/April 2023 found that 23 percent had at least one broken link. For government websites – the same size sample during the same period – 21 percent had at least one broken link.

In a sample of 50,000 English-language Wikipedia pages, 82 percent included at least one reference link – a cited source – and 11 percent of these are no longer accessible. This makes fact checking much more difficult.

For the social media platform X, which was still referred to as Twitter during the March 8 to April 27, 2023 sample period, some 18 percent of 5 million tweets were no longer accessible by June 15 of that year. Some had been suspended, some had been removed, and some had been made private.

Among the portion of tweets that got removed, half vanished within the first six days of posting, and 90 percent were no longer available within 46 days.

Twitter posts, however, also get resurrected – about 6 percent resurface at some point, a phenomenon the researchers attribute to accounts that went private and then returned to public status, or suspended accounts that got reinstated.

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Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the non-profit Internet Archive, told The Register : "This is why we do what we do."

The Wayback Machine crawls the web and archives copies of websites for posterity.

"We have identified and fixed more than 21 million broken URLs in Wikipedia articles, replacing them with archived versions of those web resources from The Wayback Machine," he explained.

Graham said the consequence of digital decay is the loss of our collective history. "When a society or people lose the ability to cite and compare and contrast, they lose the ability to do any kind of critical analysis or contextualize current events."

"We operate in the forever-now," he said. "We lose access to our memory. The ability to contextualize the events of our times depends upon having a record of our times." ®

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• iPhone models compatible with iOS 17
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• S ' class='toc-item' data-ss-analytics-link-url='https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphone-xs-iphc00446242/ios' data-ajax-endpoint='https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphone-xs-iphc00446242/ios' data-ss-analytics-event="acs.link_click" href='https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphone-xs-iphc00446242/ios' id='toc-item-IPHC00446242' data-tocid='IPHC00446242' > iPhone X S
• S Max' class='toc-item' data-ss-analytics-link-url='https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphone-xs-max-iphcd2066870/ios' data-ajax-endpoint='https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphone-xs-max-iphcd2066870/ios' data-ss-analytics-event="acs.link_click" href='https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphone-xs-max-iphcd2066870/ios' id='toc-item-IPHCD2066870' data-tocid='IPHCD2066870' > iPhone X S Max
• iPhone 11 Pro
• iPhone 11 Pro Max
• iPhone SE (2nd generation)
• iPhone 12 mini
• iPhone 12 Pro
• iPhone 12 Pro Max
• iPhone 13 mini
• iPhone 13 Pro
• iPhone 13 Pro Max
• iPhone SE (3rd generation)
• iPhone 14 Plus
• iPhone 14 Pro
• iPhone 14 Pro Max
• iPhone 15 Plus
• iPhone 15 Pro
• iPhone 15 Pro Max
• Setup basics
• Make your iPhone your own
• Take great photos and videos
• Keep in touch with friends and family
• Share features with your family
• Use iPhone for your daily routines
• Expert advice from Apple Support
• What’s new in iOS 17
• Turn on and set up iPhone
• Wake, unlock, and lock
• Set up cellular service
• Use Dual SIM
• Connect to the internet
• Sign in with Apple ID
• Subscribe to iCloud+
• Find settings
• Set up mail, contacts, and calendar accounts
• Learn the meaning of the status icons
• Charge the battery
• Charge with cleaner energy sources
• Show the battery percentage
• Check battery health and usage
• Use Low Power Mode
• Read and bookmark the user guide
• Learn basic gestures
• Learn gestures for iPhone models with Face ID
• Adjust the volume
• Silence iPhone
• Find your apps in App Library
• Switch between open apps
• Quit and reopen an app
• Multitask with Picture in Picture
• Access features from the Lock Screen
• Use the Dynamic Island
• Perform quick actions
• Search on iPhone
• Get information about your iPhone
• View or change cellular data settings
• Travel with iPhone
• Change sounds and vibrations
• Use the Action button on iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max
• Create a custom Lock Screen
• Change the wallpaper
• Adjust the screen brightness and color balance
• Keep the iPhone display on longer
• Use StandBy
• Customize the text size and zoom setting
• Change the name of your iPhone
• Change the date and time
• Change the language and region
• Organize your apps in folders
• Add, edit, and remove widgets
• Move apps and widgets on the Home Screen
• Remove or delete apps
• Use and customize Control Center
• Change or lock the screen orientation
• View and respond to notifications
• Change notification settings
• Set up a Focus
• Allow or silence notifications for a Focus
• Turn a Focus on or off
• Stay focused while driving
• Customize sharing options
• Type with the onscreen keyboard
• Dictate text
• Select and edit text
• Use predictive text
• Use text replacements
• Add or change keyboards
• Add emoji and stickers
• Take a screenshot
• Take a screen recording
• Draw in documents
• Add text, shapes, signatures, and more
• Fill out forms and sign documents
• Use Live Text to interact with content in a photo or video
• Use Visual Look Up to identify objects in your photos and videos
• Lift a subject from the photo background
• Subscribe to Apple Arcade
• Play with friends in Game Center
• Connect a game controller
• Use App Clips
• Update apps
• View or cancel subscriptions
• Manage purchases, settings, and restrictions
• Install and manage fonts
• Buy books and audiobooks
• Annotate books
• Access books on other Apple devices
• Listen to audiobooks
• Set reading goals
• Organize books
• Create and edit events in Calendar
• Send invitations
• Reply to invitations
• Change how you view events
• Search for events
• Change calendar and event settings
• Schedule or display events in a different time zone
• Keep track of events
• Use multiple calendars
• Use the Holidays calendar
• Share iCloud calendars
• Camera basics
• Set up your shot
• Apply Photographic Styles
• Take Live Photos
• Take Burst mode shots
• Take a selfie
• Take panoramic photos
• Take macro photos and videos
• Take portraits
• Take Night mode photos
• Take Apple ProRAW photos
• Adjust the shutter volume
• Adjust HDR camera settings
• Record videos
• Record spatial videos for Apple Vision Pro
• Record ProRes videos
• Record videos in Cinematic mode
• Change video recording settings
• Save camera settings
• Customize the Main camera lens
• Change advanced camera settings
• View, share, and print photos
• Use Live Text
• Scan a QR code
• See the world clock
• Set an alarm
• Change the next wake up alarm
• Use the stopwatch
• Use multiple timers
• Add and use contact information
• Edit contacts
• Add your contact info
• Use NameDrop on iPhone to share your contact info
• Use other contact accounts
• Use Contacts from the Phone app
• Merge or hide duplicate contacts
• Export contacts
• Get started with FaceTime
• Make FaceTime calls
• Receive FaceTime calls
• Create a FaceTime link
• Take a Live Photo
• Turn on Live Captions in a FaceTime call
• Use other apps during a call
• Make a Group FaceTime call
• View participants in a grid
• Use SharePlay to watch, listen, and play together
• Share your screen in a FaceTime call
• Collaborate on a document in FaceTime
• Use video conferencing features
• Hand off a FaceTime call to another Apple device
• Change the FaceTime video settings
• Change the FaceTime audio settings
• Change your appearance
• Leave a call or switch to Messages
• Block unwanted callers
• Report a call as spam
• Connect external devices or servers
• Modify files, folders, and downloads
• Search for files and folders
• Organize files and folders
• Set up iCloud Drive
• Share files and folders in iCloud Drive
• Use an external storage device, a file server, or a cloud storage service
• Share your location
• Meet up with a friend
• Send your location via satellite
• Add or remove a friend
• Locate a friend
• Get notified when friends change their location
• Notify a friend when your location changes
• Turn off Find My
• Add your iPhone
• Add your iPhone Wallet with MagSafe
• Get notified if you leave a device behind
• Locate a device
• Mark a device as lost
• Erase a device
• Remove a device
• Add an AirTag
• Share an AirTag or other item in Find My on iPhone
• Add a third-party item
• Get notified if you leave an item behind
• Locate an item
• Mark an item as lost
• Remove an item
• Adjust map settings
• Get started with Fitness
• Track daily activity and change your move goal
• See your activity summary
• Sync a third-party workout app
• Change fitness notifications
• Share your activity
• Subscribe to Apple Fitness+
• Find Apple Fitness+ workouts and meditations
• Start an Apple Fitness+ workout or meditation
• Create a Custom Plan in Apple Fitness+
• Work out together using SharePlay
• Change what’s on the screen during an Apple Fitness+ workout or meditation
• Download an Apple Fitness+ workout or meditation
• Get started with Freeform
• Create a Freeform board
• Draw or handwrite
• Apply consistent styles
• Position items on a board
• Search Freeform boards
• Share and collaborate
• Delete and recover boards
• Get started with Health
• Fill out your Health Details
• Intro to Health data
• View your health data
• Share your health data
• View health data shared by others
• Download health records
• View health records
• Monitor your walking steadiness
• Log menstrual cycle information
• View menstrual cycle predictions and history
• Track your medications
• Learn more about your medications
• Log your state of mind
• Take a mental health assessment
• Set up a schedule for a Sleep Focus
• Turn off alarms and delete sleep schedules
• Add or change sleep schedules
• Turn Sleep Focus on or off
• Change your wind down period, sleep goal, and more
• View your sleep history
• Check your headphone levels
• Use audiogram data
• Register as an organ donor
• Back up your Health data
• Intro to Home
• Upgrade to the new Home architecture
• Set up accessories
• Control accessories
• Control your home using Siri
• Use Grid Forecast to plan your energy usage
• Set up HomePod
• Control your home remotely
• Create and use scenes
• Use automations
• Set up security cameras
• Use Face Recognition
• Unlock your door with a home key
• Configure a router
• Invite others to control accessories
• Add more homes
• Get music, movies, and TV shows
• Get ringtones
• Manage purchases and settings
• Get started with Journal
• Write in your journal
• Review your past journal entries
• Change Journal settings
• Magnify nearby objects
• Change settings
• Detect people around you
• Detect doors around you
• Receive image descriptions of your surroundings
• Read aloud text and labels around you
• Set up shortcuts for Detection Mode
• Add and remove email accounts
• Set up a custom email domain
• Check your email
• Unsend email with Undo Send
• Reply to and forward emails
• Save an email draft
• Add email attachments
• Download email attachments
• Annotate email attachments
• Set email notifications
• Search for email
• Organize email in mailboxes
• Flag or block emails
• Filter emails
• Use Hide My Email
• Use Mail Privacy Protection
• Change email settings
• Delete and recover emails
• Add a Mail widget to your Home Screen
• Print emails
• Get travel directions
• Select other route options
• Find stops along your route
• View a route overview or a list of turns
• Change settings for spoken directions
• Get driving directions
• Get directions to your parked car
• Set up electric vehicle routing
• Report traffic incidents
• Get cycling directions
• Get walking directions
• Get transit directions
• Delete recent directions
• Get traffic and weather info
• Estimate travel time and ETA
• Download offline maps
• Search for places
• Find nearby attractions, restaurants, and services
• Get information about places
• Mark places
• Share places
• Rate places
• Save favorite places
• Explore new places with Guides
• Organize places in My Guides
• Clear location history
• Look around places
• Take Flyover tours
• Find your Maps settings
• Measure dimensions
• View and save measurements
• Measure a person’s height
• Use the level
• Set up Messages
• About iMessage
• Send and reply to messages
• Unsend and edit messages
• Keep track of messages
• Forward and share messages
• Group conversations
• Watch, listen, or play together using SharePlay
• Collaborate on projects
• Use iMessage apps
• Take and edit photos or videos
• Share photos, links, and more
• Send stickers
• Request, send, and receive payments
• Send and receive audio messages
• Animate messages
• Send and save GIFs
• Turn read receipts on or off
• Change notifications
• Block, filter, and report messages
• Delete messages and attachments
• Recover deleted messages
• View albums, playlists, and more
• Show song credits and lyrics
• Queue up your music
• Listen to broadcast radio
• Subscribe to Apple Music
• Play music together in the car with iPhone
• Listen to lossless music
• Listen to Dolby Atmos music
• Apple Music Sing
• Find new music
• Add music and listen offline
• Get personalized recommendations
• Listen to radio
• Search for music
• Create playlists
• See what your friends are listening to
• Use Siri to play music
• Change the way music sounds
• Get started with News
• Use News widgets
• See news stories chosen just for you
• Read stories
• Follow your favorite teams with My Sports
• Listen to Apple News Today
• Subscribe to Apple News+
• Browse and read Apple News+ stories and issues
• Use Offline Mode to read downloaded News content
• Manually download Apple News+ issues
• Listen to audio stories
• Solve puzzles in Apple News
• Solve crossword and crossword mini puzzles
• Solve Quartiles puzzles
• Search for news stories
• Save stories in News for later
• Subscribe to individual news channels
• Get started with Notes
• Add or remove accounts
• Create and format notes
• Draw or write
• Add photos, videos, and more
• Scan text and documents
• Work with PDFs
• Create Quick Notes
• Search notes
• Organize in folders
• Organize with tags
• Use Smart Folders
• Export or print notes
• Change Notes settings
• Make a call
• View and delete the call history
• Answer or decline incoming calls
• While on a call
• Have a conference or three-way call on iPhone
• Set up voicemail
• Check voicemail
• Change voicemail greeting and settings
• Select ringtones and vibrations
• Make calls using Wi-Fi
• Set up call forwarding
• Set up call waiting
• Block or avoid unwanted calls
• View photos and videos
• Play videos and slideshows
• Delete or hide photos and videos
• Edit photos and videos
• Trim video length and adjust slow motion
• Edit Cinematic mode videos
• Edit Live Photos
• Edit portraits
• Use photo albums
• Edit, share, and organize albums
• Filter and sort photos and videos in albums
• Make stickers from your photos
• Duplicate and copy photos and videos
• Merge duplicate photos and videos
• Search for photos
• Identify people and pets
• Browse photos by location
• Share photos and videos
• Share long videos
• View photos and videos shared with you
• Watch memories
• Personalize your memories
• Manage memories and featured photos
• Use iCloud Photos
• Create shared albums
• Add and remove people in a shared album
• Add and delete photos and videos in a shared album
• Set up or join an iCloud Shared Photo Library
• Add content to an iCloud Shared Photo Library
• Use iCloud Shared Photo Library
• Import and export photos and videos
• Print photos
• Find podcasts
• Listen to podcasts
• Follow your favorite podcasts
• Use the Podcasts widget
• Organize your podcast library
• Download, save, or share podcasts
• Subscribe to podcasts
• Listen to subscriber-only content
• Change download settings
• Make a grocery list
• Add items to a list
• Edit and manage a list
• Search and organize lists
• Work with templates
• Use Smart Lists
• Print reminders
• Use the Reminders widget
• Change Reminders settings
• Browse the web
• Search for websites
• Customize your Safari settings
• Change the layout
• Use Safari profiles
• Open and close tabs
• Organize your tabs
• View your Safari tabs from another Apple device
• Share Tab Groups
• Use Siri to listen to a webpage
• Bookmark favorite webpages
• Save pages to a Reading List
• Find links shared with you
• Annotate and save a webpage as a PDF
• Automatically fill in forms
• Get extensions
• Hide ads and distractions
• Clear your cache and cookies
• Browse the web privately
• Use passkeys in Safari
• Check stocks
• Manage multiple watchlists
• Read business news
• Add earnings reports to your calendar
• Use a Stocks widget
• Translate text, voice, and conversations
• Translate text in apps
• Translate with the camera view
• Subscribe to Apple TV+, MLS Season Pass, or an Apple TV channel
• Add your TV provider
• Get shows, movies, and more
• Watch sports
• Watch Major League Soccer with MLS Season Pass
• Control playback
• Manage your library
• Change the settings
• Make a recording
• Play it back
• Edit or delete a recording
• Keep recordings up to date
• Organize recordings
• Search for or rename a recording
• Share a recording
• Duplicate a recording
• Keep cards and passes in Wallet
• Set up Apple Pay
• Use Apple Pay for contactless payments
• Use Apple Pay in apps and on the web
• Track your orders
• Use Apple Cash
• Use Apple Card
• Use Savings
• Pay for transit
• Access your home, hotel room, and vehicle
• Add identity cards
• Use COVID-19 vaccination cards
• Check your Apple Account balance
• Use Express Mode
• Organize your Wallet
• Remove cards or passes
• Check the weather
• Check the weather in other locations
• View weather maps
• Manage weather notifications
• Use Weather widgets
• Learn the weather icons
• Find out what Siri can do
• Tell Siri about yourself
• Have Siri announce calls and notifications
• Add Siri Shortcuts
• About Siri Suggestions
• Use Siri in your car
• Change Siri settings
• Contact emergency services
• Use Emergency SOS via satellite
• Request Roadside Assistance via satellite
• Set up and view your Medical ID
• Use Check In
• Manage Crash Detection
• Reset privacy and security settings in an emergency
• Set up Family Sharing
• Add Family Sharing members
• Remove Family Sharing members
• Share subscriptions
• Share purchases
• Share locations with family and locate lost devices
• Set up Apple Cash Family and Apple Card Family
• Set up parental controls
• Set up a child’s device
• Get started with Screen Time
• Protect your vision health with Screen Distance
• Set up Screen Time
• Set communication and safety limits and block inappropriate content
• Set up Screen Time for a family member
• Charging cable
• Power adapters
• MagSafe chargers and battery packs
• MagSafe cases and sleeves
• Qi-certified wireless chargers
• Use AirPods
• Use EarPods
• Apple Watch
• Wirelessly stream videos and photos to Apple TV or a smart TV
• Connect to a display with a cable
• HomePod and other wireless speakers
• Pair Magic Keyboard
• Enter characters with diacritical marks
• Switch between keyboards
• Use shortcuts
• Choose an alternative keyboard layout
• Change typing assistance options
• External storage devices
• Bluetooth accessories
• Share your internet connection
• Allow phone calls on your iPad and Mac
• Use iPhone as a webcam
• Hand off tasks between devices
• Cut, copy, and paste between iPhone and other devices
• Stream video or mirror the screen of your iPhone
• Start SharePlay instantly
• Use AirDrop to send items
• Connect iPhone and your computer with a cable
• Transfer files between devices
• Transfer files with email, messages, or AirDrop
• Transfer files or sync content with the Finder or iTunes
• Automatically keep files up to date with iCloud
• Intro to CarPlay
• Connect to CarPlay
• Use your vehicle’s built-in controls
• Get turn-by-turn directions
• Change the map view
• Make phone calls
• View your calendar
• Send and receive text messages
• Announce incoming text messages
• Play podcasts
• Play audiobooks
• Listen to news stories
• Control your home
• Use other apps with CarPlay
• Rearrange icons on CarPlay Home
• Change settings in CarPlay
• Get started with accessibility features
• Turn on accessibility features for setup
• Change Siri accessibility settings
• Open features with Accessibility Shortcut
• Change color and brightness
• Make text easier to read
• Reduce onscreen motion
• Customize per-app visual settings
• Hear what’s on the screen or typed
• Hear audio descriptions
• Turn on and practice VoiceOver
• Change your VoiceOver settings
• Use VoiceOver gestures
• Operate iPhone when VoiceOver is on
• Control VoiceOver using the rotor
• Use the onscreen keyboard
• Write with your finger
• Keep the screen off
• Use VoiceOver with an Apple external keyboard
• Use a braille display
• Type braille on the screen
• Customize gestures and keyboard shortcuts
• Use VoiceOver with a pointer device
• Use VoiceOver for images and videos
• Use VoiceOver in apps
• Use AssistiveTouch
• Adjust how iPhone responds to your touch
• Use Reachability
• Auto-answer calls
• Turn off vibration
• Change Face ID and attention settings
• Use Voice Control
• Adjust the side or Home button
• Use Apple TV Remote buttons
• Adjust pointer settings
• Adjust keyboard settings
• Control iPhone with an external keyboard
• Adjust AirPods settings
• Turn on Apple Watch Mirroring
• Control a nearby Apple device
• Intro to Switch Control
• Set up and turn on Switch Control
• Select items, perform actions, and more
• Control several devices with one switch
• Use hearing devices
• Use Live Listen
• Use sound recognition
• Set up and use RTT and TTY
• Flash the indicator light for notifications
• Adjust audio settings
• Play background sounds
• Display subtitles and captions
• Show transcriptions for Intercom messages
• Get live captions of spoken audio
• Type to speak
• Record a Personal Voice
• Lock iPhone to one app with Guided Access
• Use built-in privacy and security protections
• Set a passcode
• Set up Face ID
• Set up Touch ID
• Control access to information on the Lock Screen
• Keep your Apple ID secure
• Use passkeys to sign in to apps and websites
• Sign in with Apple
• Share passwords
• Automatically fill in strong passwords
• Change weak or compromised passwords
• View your passwords and related information
• Share passkeys and passwords securely with AirDrop
• Make your passkeys and passwords available on all your devices
• Automatically fill in verification codes
• Automatically fill in SMS passcodes
• Sign in with fewer CAPTCHA challenges
• Use two-factor authentication
• Use security keys
• Manage information sharing with Safety Check
• Control app tracking permissions
• Control the location information you share
• Control access to information in apps
• Control how Apple delivers advertising to you
• Control access to hardware features
• Create and manage Hide My Email addresses
• Protect your web browsing with iCloud Private Relay
• Use a private network address
• Use Advanced Data Protection
• Use Lockdown Mode
• Use Stolen Device Protection
• Receive warnings about sensitive content
• Use Contact Key Verification
• Turn iPhone on or off
• Force restart iPhone
• Back up iPhone
• Reset iPhone settings
• Restore all content from a backup
• Restore purchased and deleted items
• Sell, give away, or trade in your iPhone
• Erase iPhone
• Install or remove configuration profiles
• Important safety information
• Important handling information
• Find more resources for software and service
• FCC compliance statement
• ISED Canada compliance statement
• Ultra Wideband information
• Class 1 Laser information
• Apple and the environment
• Disposal and recycling information
• Unauthorized modification of iOS

Clear your cache and cookies on iPhone

Note: Clearing your browsing history in Safari doesn’t clear any browsing histories kept independently by websites you visited, or your browsing history in other apps.

Below Clear Timeframe, choose how much of your browsing history to clear.

Note: If you have Safari profiles set up, select a profile to clear only the history of that profile, or select All Profiles.

Tap Clear History.