The Inter..wha?

The history of the Internet and Web can be a confusing thing. Even those of us who consider ourselves somewhat tech savvy can get lost in the jargon.
While there were many milestones that led to the Internet we use today, there are two important inventions to note: the creation of ARPANET and the World Wide Web.
The Internet Society, a non-profit international group focusing on Internet education and public policy, provides a detailed, yet concise history of the Internet here. J.C.R. Licklider, who was the first to head the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960s, envisioned computers could be linked together to access all kinds of information quickly and from great distances. His theory would later be put to the test and perfected over next the next four decades.
Lawrence G. Roberts, a researcher at MIT, began working at ARPA in the late 1960s. Roberts presented a paper in 1967 where he laid out his plan for ARPANET, the first packet switching network of computers, thanks to the initial research by Leonard Kleinrock.
This timeline outlines how ARPANET continued to develop and highlights milestones. By 1972 ARPANET included NASA, the Federal Reserve Board and the National Science Foundation in its network. By the 1980s ARPANET had expanded overseas and was retired in 1990.
Perhaps one of the greatest inventions since the creation of the Internet was the World Wide Web. Tim Burners-Lee, a physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was responsible for the web as we know it today. He was looking for a way to better communicate information over the Internet by using hypertext, which he outlines in his proposal. Since then the web has grown in incredible numbers, with 135,166,473 sites currently online, according to Netcraft, which surveys sites on the web. Most of the growth can be attributed to social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, which allow users to create their own pages.
The Internet and web are ever-changing technology that continue to become more efficient and user friendly. Now the challenge remains to create access for everyone.