Arpanet

In the late 1960's the development started of several packet switched network solutions including ARPANET and X.25. In the years to follow the demand for public access started to grow, however all networks back then were seperated and served by limited gateways.

Due to this limitation development started on a simple common network system ( The Internet Protocol Suite), hence the Internet was born.

Back then nobody would have had any idea how "Big of a thing" the internet would become. My first computer was an Oric1 wich i got in 1984, it was a funny little thing and was supposed to compete with a Sinclair Spectrum ZX. The programming was in basic and it was fun to make small little scripts with looped text messages. The 1980's is also the time frame in wich microsoft became the money making machine it is today . check out the video for the birth of Microsoft and downfall of CP/M.

See for yourself how Microsoft ripped CP/M and launched there own operating system 6 times cheaer than CP/M! Watch the  creator of the first operatng system here.

So if we fastforward to the early 1990's we see that the first access providers start to launch, in the Netherlands the first internet access provider was XS4all wich had 500 signups for internet access on the very first day ! Since then internet has become part of our every day life, we can't imagine what a world without internet would  be like.