Personal computers cam along in the late 1970s, but were very expensive and difficult to operate. Industry began using computers in the 1950s. The computer was as big as a football field and had more than 10,000 cathode ray tubes and about 40 miles of cable. Known as "ENIGMA," THE computer unlocked the Ultra secrets. PS: The world's first 'COMPUTER' WAS built by US and British engineers in 1942 to break the German military's secret codes. That was just 21 years ago and look where the internet is now. The internet expanded exponentially when Microsoft introduced Windows 95, an operating system that could send and receive, search the internet, produce documents and operate CDs inserted. Or, if the dialup number was known, that number was typed in and routed thru the modem. Originally, an IP was a series of numbers but as more and more companies signed on, the scientists found a way to eliminate numbers and use words like or The user had to have a dialup modem that called phone numbers in sequence until it found a phone using a dialup modem. The Internet was developed in 1983 by scientists from CalTech using fiber optic cables and IP. The system used code, of course, but could be sent instantly (almost) ON existing phone lines or on the emerging network of communications satellites. When I was in the US Army Security Agency in the early 1970s, engineers produced a version of email that allowed military installations to easily converse with one another without radio transmissions. FidoNet and UUCP were store-and-forward technologies, meaning the user's email might not be transferred for hours, or even days.įor more background, this page offers a good comparison of FidoNet and UUCP. These gateways did not offer interactive or direct connections. ![]() This style of access, though, is not in the spirit of your second question ("where you open a connection to the internet, launch a web browser, and type in a domain name"). Since FidoNet was an ad-hoc network of dial-up systems, with most nodes available to the public for free or at low cost, these UUCP gateways would have given users indirect access to the early Internet (assuming the UUCP host was connected to the Internet, which became more common as time went on). UFGATE (UUCP-to-FidoNet Gateway) was the standard gateway for transferring mail and news. Gateways between FidoNet and the uucp network, and hence the Internet,īecame sufficiently reliable for production use. To answer the main question ("When was internet access first available to public in USA?"), one candidate would be FidoNet, an early popular BBS (Bulletin Board System).Īccording to this history, FidoNet had working UUCP gateways as early as 1986:Īlthough primitive experiments had been conducted earlier, in 1986 Plus ISPs opened up in a huge number of countries very quickly. Once ISPs started offering Internet access to anyone with a credit card, they didn't care what country you phoned in from. While the American government did start it off with Arpanet, that was restricted to a government/military/higher-education audience. It is mostly incorrect to think of the Internet as an "American" thing. The first really popular browser was Mosaic, which came out in 1993 and developed by Marc Andreessen. (Well, people have stretched other programs to include browser functionality, such as EMACS.) So the seminal date would be in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the web browser. The web itself could not exist without a browser. ![]() There was a cross-pollination period between BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems, which started around 1978), private companies that offered their own computer offerings such as CompuServe and AOL, and the Internet. Early features included e-mail, FTP (File Transfer Protocol for making files available to others), gopher (a hierarchal index of FTP sites and their contents), and newsgroups (open predecessor to commercial sites such as Facebook and Twitter). It predated the web, with the first commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) beginning around 1989. The Internet was (and is) an evolving medium.
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