The internet

The internet's roots go back to U.S. military networking research in the 1960s (ARPANET) and academic networks in the 1970s and 1980s. The development of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989-1991 made the internet accessible to general users. Through the 1990s the internet went from a specialist tool to a mass medium. By 2000 there were about 400 million users globally; today there are over 5 billion.

The internet enabled:

• Instant global communication through email, messaging, and video calls
• E-commerce (Amazon was founded 1994, eBay 1995)
• Online media that displaced traditional newspapers, radio, and television in many cases
• Social media (Facebook 2004, Twitter 2006, Instagram 2010, TikTok 2016) that reshaped how people connect and consume information
• Cloud computing that centralized data storage and processing
• Streaming services that transformed entertainment and journalism