ARPANET was created in 1969, but personally I would say the “real” Internet was born in 1982/83 when the government moved ARPANET and their other networks over to TCP/IP protocol.
The Web of course didn’t exist until the end of 1990 but the Web is just one application of the Internet albeit by far the dominant one since 1994ish when the browser made it explode in popularity.
I would consider 1 January 1983, the date the government moved ARPANET over to TCP/IP officially the Internet’s birthday and thus the Internet is now about 30 years old to my reckoning.
I don’t think you could pick one date. There were commercial ISPs as early as 1989 in a couple small localities and you had things like Prodigy in the early 90s that were widespread and similar to the Internet but different networks. I’d say 1994 is a pretty good date; that’s when AOL started allowing a gateway to the World Wide Web, but from 89-93 it was commercially available to a limited extent.
I remember having a modem with my Apple //e that we got around 1983 maybe 84. I don’t remember how long after the computer purchase I got the modem or for the life of me what I used it for. I think I logged onto some apple user software board or maybe something to do with gaming. I had some very geeky tech savvy computer friends.
But, none of that helps me come up with a protocol for how to answer the question in the OP.
As we currently understand “The Internet” I’d agree AOL’s opening up the doors to the Web in 1994 is a pretty good starting point. Prior to that, the Internet existed, but it was not in any way what it is now, and could not have been. It was in the mid-90s that it started to become known to the general public, and then USED by the general public.
It is interesting to note that the movie “You’ve Got Mail,” a story about two adults who fall in love over the Internet, was released in 1998. The film assumes that the viewer understands the concept of email and Internet, and even seems to assume the viewer knows about the idea that meeting someone online is something people do but is kind of embarrassing. Had it been released five years prior, it wouldn’t have even made sense to most people; the title itself is borrowed from AOL. In 1993 very few people used the Internet in any way; by 1998 almost half of Americans did (or maybe a third; sources disagree.)
I’d go with the advent of domain name addressing, in 1983. Cite. Before then we sent email going through known mail nodes like decvax, ucbvax and ihnp4,
AOL was definitely not the internet, since you dialed into specific AOL servers and were isolated from anyone else. That’s no more the Internet than PLATO, which I used in 1974, was. In any case I got an ISP and was able to bop around using Archie and Veronica sometime in the late 1980s, long before the Web started.
The Web was actually created in the late autumn of 1990 but was mostly self-referencing for the first year or two after its release mid-1991, not to mention vastly overshadowed by other Internet services. It didn’t really get much attention until the Mosaic browser came out in 1993.
Archie was actually created in 1990 but yeah, to me anything until 1992 is pretty much still the 80s anyways.
I agree with you AOL wasn’t the true Internet. Not during its early days, at least. I was actually born in January of 1990 and I definitely knew the Internet existed by 1996 because my mom was already addicted to it. My dad is an electronic engineer though and he was always the first person in our neighborhood to have the Internet or online services.
I’d say somewhere between 1994 and 1997 everyone discovered what the Internet was, and by the early 2000s basically everyone had joined.
Take this with a huge dose of salt, but for me it was when Windows 95 came out. I got a job doing tech support in December of 1995. Most of our computers had Windows 3.11. The supervisors got Windows 95 around that time. I remeber one of them getting this new computer with '95 and searching around on the internet for a couple minutes before shutting it down because he was afraid of getting in trouble. I don’t recall there being a way to get on the internet from my Windows 3.11 computer, but '95 made it easy.
When casually handing out one’s e-mail address became something to think twice about - i.e. while its use had been limited to a relative handful of corporate and computer professionals, but instead left one vulnerable to be hassled by anonymous advertisers and stalkers.
Or at least that’s when we realized that it grown beyond control.
Usenet was begun in [url=Usenet - Wikipedia]1979 - 1980,]/url] though I didn’t see my first newsreader until 1986 or so. The Web is built on the internet, the internet was there long before the Web was - and long, long before it played in Peoria.
When I started seeing URLs on buses I knew the good old days were gone.
I moved to California from NJ in 1996, and I was seeing them well before that - '93 or '94 perhaps.
But the real change was when Sun started shipping workstations without C compilers, assuming correctly that non-programmers would use them grumble grumble get off my digital lawn.
I sometimes mention to people that my husband and I met on the internet in 1985. But we just talked in chat rooms on local BBSs. That wasn’t exactly the “World Wide Web.”
Such a marriage was relatively unknown at the time and the local news wanted to cover it. We said no. But some of the people who came to the wedding we had known only through those local systems and had never met them face to face.
The web is simply not the beginning of the internet.
Unless by “when the internet was born” you mean “when the internet got popular with non-nerds”.
Certainly 1969 has to be a big date. That’s when a national network of multiple smaller, different kinds of networks got joined together into an “internet”. 1983-84, when NSF started letting non-researchers online was another big date.
Seems like people are answering the IMHO question “when were you first aware of the internet?” Which for me was when my friends’ family got AOL in early 1994 and we started spending a lot of time in chat rooms. However, I didn’t get internet in my own house until 1999, when I was a junior in high school.
I agree that the Internet began with the use of IP, and take your word for it that this was in 1983. That sounds right, and I was working on (non-IP) networking around that time.
But Voyager wins the prize for the key element that really made it usable (DNS), and with a cite to boot.
I used various networks from MERIT (UMICH and other universities) to ad-hoc intercorporate networks in those early days. By the late 80’s I was working in OSI networking, and our small company got online through our business partner Motorola, for my first use of “The Internet” (which is misnamed, by the way: it’s really an “inter-subnet”.) I had one of those coveted short email addresses: “jjl@one.com” or “jeff@one.com”.
I got an AOL account that I still have, in 1994. I actually got it for my son to use, since I had access through work. I use my AOL email as a spam collector, keeping my other email addresses off the public radar.
1994 was when the WWW came out of the closet. Definitely not the beginning of the Internet, which was well before that, and not even the beginning of the Web, just the year it hit the big time for home users. Prior to that I heard people talking about USENET and COMPUSERV, but I wasn’t interested in a text-only interface for hobby use.
I made a pot of money on AOL stock, and then lost it by holding.
OSI was a competitor to the TCP/IP suite of protocols. It turned out to be a waste of time, except for ISIS (a routing protocol like OSPF, useful but without which we could manage just fine) and the X.500 protocols for Directory Services, which are used to provide the backbone for DNS these days, as well as the information infrastructure for VoIP and similar applications.
