History of the Web

In October 1957 the Soviet Union successfully launched the world's first satellite Sputnik 1 into Earth’s orbit.
This event lead directly to the creation of the US Department of Defense, ARPA.
Perhaps their most famous project (certainly the most widely used) was the creation of the Internet.

In 1960, psychologist and computer scientist Joseph Licklider published a paper entitled Man-Computer Symbiosis.
Licklider's work would become the theoretical basis of ARPANET
Presented in October 1967, and in December 1969 the first four-computer network was up and running.

The core problem in creating a network was how to connect separate physical networks without tying up network resources for constant links.
The technique that solved this problem is known as packet switching and it involves data requests being split into small chunks (packets,) which can be processed quickly without blocking communication from other parties — this principle is still used to run the Internet today.

This proliferation of different networking protocols soon became a problem, when trying to get all the separate networks to communicate.
In 1974, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf created a system that masked the differences between networking protocols using a new standard called the Internet Transmission Control Program.
This specification reduced the role of the network and moved the responsibility of maintaining transmission integrity to the host computer.
The result was that it became possible to easily join almost all networks together.
By 1982 the ARPANET connections outside of the US were converted to use the new TCP/IP protocol.
The Internet as we know it had arrived.

Gopher was an information retrieval system used in the early 1990s, providing a method of delivering menus of links to files, computer resources and other menus. These menus could cross the boundaries of the current computer and use the Internet to fetch menus from other systems.
In February, 1993, they announced that it was going to charge licensing fees for the use of their reference implementation of the Gopher server.
As a consequence, many organizations started to look for alternatives to Gopher.

The European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland had such an alternative.
Tim Berners-Lee had been working on a information management system, in which text could contain links and references to other works, allowing the reader to quickly jump from document to document.
He had created a server for publishing this style of document (called hypertext) as well as a program for reading them, which he had called WorldWideWeb.
This software had first been released in 1991, however, it took two events to cause an explosion in popularity and the eventual replacement of Gopher.
On April 30, 1993 CERN released the source code of WorldWideWeb into the public domain

Later in 1993, NCSA released a program that was a combined web browser and Gopher client, called Mosaic.
The number of available web browsers increased dramatically, many created by research projects at universities and corporations.

Marc Andreessen left NCSA and with Jim Clark and created Netscape Communications Corporation
Netscape Navigator version 1.0 was released in December 1994.
Spyglass Inc. (the commercial arm of NCSA) licensed Mosaic to Microsoft to form the basis of Internet Explorer (IE)
IE Version 1.0 was released in August 1995
A rapid escalation soon followed, with Netscape and Microsoft each trying to get a competitive edge in terms of the features they support in order to attract developers - the browser wars.
Opera maintained a small but steady presence throughout this period, and tried to innovate and support web standards as well as possible in these times.

This material was originally published as part of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, available as 2: The history of the Internet and the web, and the evolution of web standards, written by Mark Norman Francis, and Get familiar with HTML5!, written by Chris Mills. It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial - Share Alike 2.5 license, which is compatible with the licenses of the originals.
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1.2 History of the Web