Henk van de Goor's Bloggers@large

Many of you might not know it, but today marks the 20th birthday of the Internet. Back in 1988 at 14:28 exactly, Piet Beertema, sysop for the Dutch CWI in Amsterdam, received the first intercontinental e-mail, send over a half-open network. Until then the Internet had been a purely US network, used by exclusively by universities and the US Defense. Indeed the term "Internet" has been used since 1974, but if you look at the timeline of the Internet, it wasn't until 1988 that it really started to span the globe. But Internet really took off after the invention of a tool to organize information on the internet using a graphical interface, called a "webbrowser". Tim Berners-Lee invented the online equivalent of hypertext in 1989 and some years later the World Wide Web really began with the introduction of the "Mosaic web browser" in 1993. This was a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Mosaic was eventually superseded in 1994 by Andreessen's Netscape Navigator, which replaced Mosaic as the world's most popular browser.

After that it is all history.