Internet Revolution
Between 1993 and 1995, the World Wide Web (www, or the Web), a user-friendly information-sharing network system, quietly came into being and began to spread. In its first fifteen years, the Web reshaped U.S. communications, businesses, and politics, fueled worldwide economic growth, and became a central feature in the daily lives of more than a billion people. The Internet age began in the 1960s, when computer specialists in Europe began to exchange information from a main computer to a remote terminal by breaking down data into small packets of information that could be reassembled at the receiving end. The system was called packet switching. In 1968, the U.S. Department of Defense engaged scientists to create a national communications system. Experimenting with packetswitching, the government scientists eventually linked several computers over telephone lines to operate as a single system. The system was called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). By 1983, re...