Internet of the worldwide

The Internet is a network, or system, that connects millions of computers worldwide. It was one of the greatest inventions of the 1900s. Today the Internet helps many people communicate, work, learn, and have fun.

In the 1960s the U.S. government, businesses, and colleges worked together to make a system that would let computers across the United States share information. They created an early form of the Internet called ARPANET in 1969. In 1971 electronic mail, or e-mail, was invented as a way to send a message from one computer to another.

By the mid-1970s many groups of computers were connected in networks. Machines called routers were invented to connect the networks. This is how the original ARPANET eventually grew into the Internet.

In 1989 hypertext was invented. Hypertext is a link between different parts of an electronic document or between different documents. Hypertext became the basis of the World Wide Web, or “the Web,” which was created in the early 1990s.

Information on the Web is arranged in sites or pages. People view Web sites using computer programs called Internet browsers. People create Web sites using a code called hypertext markup language, or HTML. Browsers read HTML and allow people to view Web sites on the computer. Each Web site has its own Internet address, called a uniform resource locator, or URL.