The Internet evolved over time into what it is today, but origins of the Internet began as a US government-funded network. It was intended to provide a non-localized, redundant means of communication between military, scientific, educational and government entities, should a nuclear strike occur. Ideas for the Internet developed contemporaneously in many cases, and origins of the Internet involved many visionaries, only a few of which are named herein.

In 1962 Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915 - 1990), an American computer scientists at MIT, envisioned a worldwide network of computers that could easily communicate with one another. Licklider soon moved to the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to oversee development. From this point forward many people were involved in the origins of the Internet within the various stages of development.

In brief, Leonard Kleinrock of MIT was instrumental in devising packet switching, the means by which data moves across the Internet. Others active in the origins of the Internet include Lawrence Roberts, also of MIT. In 1965 Roberts used dial-up to connect a computer in Massachusetts to one in California. Though he did not use packet switching it became evident it would be required over the inadequate circuit switching used by the telephone company.

Roberts joined DARPA in 1966 to help develop the first packet switching network under the newly named Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). ARPANET is considered synonymous with the origins of the Internet. Other people were also involved in this endeavor and made significant contributions to the origins of the Internet.

The fledgling ARPA network consisting of four nodes (computers), was connected successfully on 5 December 1969. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol), developed throughout the 1970s, was implemented fully on New Year’s Day, 1983. These protocols opened the network to commercial entities and allowed Local Area Networks (LANs) to connect to Wide Area Networks (WANs), critical within the evolution of the origins of the Internet.

There were many other significant developments in the early years that involved other protocols separate from the Internet, but ran within it. These included email and the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), which allowed users to exchange information in newsgroups over a User Network (USENET). Telnet and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) were two other protocols in use, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was a third that came in 1988.

However, early origins of the Internet were far from user friendly. Tim Berners-Lee of CERN would change that by proposing hypertext language, implemented in 1991. This introduced the World Wide Web and opened the world to graphical browsing and point-and-click navigation. In November 1992, Delphi made its mark by being the first nationwide commercial provider to offer their clients Internet access.

By October of 1994 early Internauts were treated to the initial release of Mosaic Netscape 0.9, the first widely successful graphical Web browser. Pioneered by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, the browser would eventually become Netscape Navigator, the toast of the Internet. Microsoft soon released Internet Explorer 1.0, though Netscape Navigator held favor until Microsoft began integrating its browser into the ubiquitous Windows operating systems.

In 1995 The National Science Foundation (NSF), which had been funding the Internet backbone for non-commercial purposes, ended their sponsorship. Private services like CompuServ, AOL and Prodigy offered pipelines to the Internet, and commercially available software allowed anyone to automatically configure their computer for Internet use. The rest, as they say, is history.