The Internet was first conceived in the early '60s under the leadership of the Defense Department Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). It intended promoting the sharing of information amongst researchers in the United States.

In 1969 ARPANET connected four universities in the United States...connecting Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

ARPANET was designed to allow scientists to share data on remote computers, but email quickly became its most popular application. Everyone starting using it to discuss various interests.

The InterNetworking Working Group becomes the first of several standards to govern the growing network in 1972. Vinton Cerf was elected the first chairman and later became known as a "Father of the Internet."

In 1973 ARPANET went international with connections to University College in London, England and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway.

The general public got a hint of how networked computers could be used in 1974 as the commercial version of the ARPANET went online. The ARPANET started to move away from its military/research roots.

Two grad students at Duke University working with another at the University of North Carolina established the first USENET newsgroups in 1979. Users from all over joined these groups to talk about the net, politics,..etc.

In 1982 Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf were key members of a team which created TCP/IP, the language of all Internet computers and the Internet as we know it today was born.

The mid-80s marked a boom in the personal computer and internet e-mail and newsgroups became part of life at many universities.

By 1988 the Internet was an essential tool for communications, however it had concerns about privacy. New concerns, such as "hacker," and" electronic break-in", were becoming a major concern.

These new worries became reality on Nov. 1, 1988 when a malicious program called the "Internet Worm" temporarily disabled approximately 6,000 of the 60,000 Internet hosts.

In 1988 the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was formed to address concerns raised by the Worm.

System administrator turned author, Clifford Stoll, caught a group of Cyberspies in 1989, and wrote the best-seller "The Cuckoo's Egg". The number of Internet hosts exceeded 100,000.

The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990, leaving only the vast network-of-networks called the Internet. The World Wide Web project was started in 1990, and over the next two years was responsible for the first web sites and browsers (text-based). Now called the W3 Consortium started in '94 by Tim Berners-Lee. They are the official standards for HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). The number of hosts now exceeds 300,000 and the World Wide Web is born.

In 1991 commercial network traffic was banned from the National Science Foundation's NSFNET, the backbone of the Internet. In 1991 NSF lifted the restriction thus beginning the age of electronic commerce.

At the University of Minnesota, a computer programmer Mark MaCahill released "gopher," the first point-and-click way of navigating the files of the Internet in 1991. 1991 was also the year in which Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN in Switzerland, posted the computer code of the World Wide Web in a newsgroup, "alt.hypertext." The ability to combine words, pictures, and sounds on Web pages excited many since you only needed a word processor to compose a web page.

Marc Andreesen and a group of student programmers at NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications located on the campus of University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) would eventually develop a browser for the World Wide Web called Mosaic.

In 1991, traffic on the NSF backbone network exceeded 1 trillion bytes per month. The first audio and video broadcasts took place over a portion of the Internet known as the "MBONE" in 1992. More than 1,000,000 hosts were part of the Internet and had multi-media access to the Internet over the MBONE.

Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web browser, became available in 1993. Traffic on the Internet expanded at a 341,634% annual growth rate.

NSFNET reverted back to a research project in 1995. The Internet became commercial. The Web now comprised the bulk of Internet traffic. James Gosling and some programmers at Sun Microsystems released an Internet programming language called Java, radically altering the way applications and information could be retrieved, displayed, and used over the Internet.

By 1996 almost 150 countries around the world were now connected to the Internet. The number of computer hosts approached 10 million.

Internet celebrated its 25th anniversary and the military influence became a historical footnotes. Approximately 40 million people were connected to the Internet. More than $1 billion per year changed hands at Internet shopping malls, and companies like Netscape became leading high-tech investors.

Within 30 years, the Internet had grown from a Cold War concept to the Information Superhighway.