# What year would you say the Internet was born? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 25, 2013, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330 "2013-05-25T18:30:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2013, 8:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330/61 "2013-07-31T08:40:09Z")
1989, November. Tim Berners-Lee. Didn’t you see the Olympic opening ceremony? > **[World Wide Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web)** > > The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). > Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers. Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through character strings called uniform resource locators (... ---
**Author:** ![dasmoocher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2013, 9:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330/62 "2013-07-31T09:56:05Z")
This was interesting: [News report from 1981 about the Internet](http://www.wimp.com/theinternet/). I saw this today. Not positive it’s from 1981. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2013, 12:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330/63 "2013-07-31T12:51:34Z")
At about 1:10 in the above video there’s a shot of a screen showing the date 5/16/81. It also mentions the “estimated 2 to 3,000 home computer users in the Bay area”, which implies it was quite early in the PC days. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2013, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330/64 "2013-07-31T13:32:12Z")
The hairstyles fit the date, too, and that time period is when CompuServe was getting into the biz. The video quality is pretty good for something that would have been transferred from VHS (which was also pretty new then). Was that a studio master tape or something? ---
**Author:** ![dasmoocher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2013, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330/65 "2013-07-31T18:50:29Z")
> [@JohnT](#): > > At about 1:10 in the above video there’s a shot of a screen showing the date 5/16/81. It also mentions the “estimated 2 to 3,000 home computer users in the Bay area”, which implies it was quite early in the PC days. Good eye for detail. I just wanted to qualify I didn’t know for sure when it was aired. Never can be too sure about claims on this interweb thingie. I liked how they described the one guy as “Owns Home Computer” in the caption. ---
**Author:** ![dasmoocher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2013, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330/66 "2013-07-31T18:54:56Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > The hairstyles fit the date, too, and that time period is when CompuServe was getting into the biz. > > The video quality is pretty good for something that would have been transferred from VHS (which was also pretty new then). Was that a studio master tape or something? No idea about the master tape. Friend posted it on Facebook yesterday and when I read this thread, I thought some might get a kick out of it. ---
**Author:** ![filmstar-en](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/50afbb/32.png) [@filmstar-en](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmstar-en)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2013, 8:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330/67 "2013-08-05T08:35:36Z")
Looks like the older guy was using an old Radio Shack Tandy TRS80. Through the 1980s there were plenty of dialup bulletin board systems around and the they were connected to in networks like Fidonet to create an email system and allow connect to newsgrounps. My first experience of the Internet was through a gateway on one these systems in the late 1980s. It wasn’t much to speak of until direct dialup services from ISPs became available in 1992 in the UK. > **[Demon Internet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Internet)** > > Demon Internet was a British Internet service provider, initially an independent business, later operating as a brand of Vodafone. It was one of the UK's earliest ISPs, offering dial-up Internet access services from 1 June 1992. According to the Daily Telegraph, it "sparked a revolution by becoming the first to provide genuinely affordable access to the internet in the UK". > In 1997 Demon was bought by Scottish Telecom, a wholly owned subsidiary of the private utility company Scottish Power. Sc... These direct dialup services were kind of overshadowed up by the dominance of the big bulletin board systems like AOL and MSN until Mr Berners Lee came along with his new fangled Internet browser which made things sooo much easier for the dialup internet and introduced hyperlinks that created the web and page surfing as we know it. I would point out that there was plenty of networking going in big corporations. All the big computer suppliers have their own set of protocols and equipment. Often far more technically advanced than IP. But they were proprietary, not public and cost big dollars. TCP/IP, Ethernet, DNS and HTML were Open Source and that was fundamental for the creation and spread of the Internet as the public network we know today. If it happened in 1992 in the UK, I am pretty sure these early dialup ISPs were starting in the US before then. It is an interesting question because big networks (in its broadest sense) come along once in a generation and have a fundamental impact on the world. The right ingredients have to be in place. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2013, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330/68 "2013-08-05T16:41:24Z")
> [@filmstar-en](#): > > These direct dialup services were kind of overshadowed up by the dominance of the big bulletin board systems like AOL and MSN until Mr Berners Lee came along with his new fangled Internet browser which made things sooo much easier for the dialup internet and introduced hyperlinks that created the web and page surfing as we know it. > > I would point out that there was plenty of networking going in big corporations. All the big computer suppliers have their own set of protocols and equipment. Often far more technically advanced than IP. But they were proprietary, not public and cost big dollars. TCP/IP, Ethernet, DNS and HTML were Open Source and that was fundamental for the creation and spread of the Internet as the public network we know today. Big corporations had internet well before this - in the early 1980s at Bell Labs, at least. I don’t know how you can call Ethernet open source, since it is basically hardware, developed at Xerox Parc. AT&T had its own version, not necessary if it was actually open source. UNIX before this was more or less open source, for universities at least. Hyperlinks long predate the web. I think Ted Nelson gets credit for dreaming them up, and they were in heavy use in the PLATO system in the early 1970s. Today consumers often have better computing equipment at home than they get at work. This wasn’t true back then. The Internet was around long before the average person got to look at it. Or understood it. ---
**Author:** ![filmstar-en](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/50afbb/32.png) [@filmstar-en](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmstar-en)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2013, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330/69 "2013-08-06T00:00:54Z")
Indeed Ethernet is hardware and was originally developed by DEC, Intel and Xerox but a version of it was submitted for consideration by the IEEE and it was adopted with a few modifications as a standard that manufacturers could use to ensure there equipment was interoperable. There were other LAN standards at the time (eg Token Ring) that were effectively controlled by large players like IBM. The IEEE Ethernet was widely adopted because it was cheap to implement needing far simpler chipsets than than Token Ring and were more widely available. Another hardware standard, 10baseT unsheilded twisted pair wiring, was also instrumental in making Ethernet popular. Markup languages and hyperlinks do have a long history but they rarely saw application outside of specific software and document standards used by specific industries. SGML was a very heavyweight implementation, quite unsuited to the Web. Berner-Lee developed HTML as a lightweight mark up language with hyperlinks. HTML was open source and came along at just the right time to make Internet content user friendly. I cannot imagine the Internet taking off if it remained a mixture of text based content and a collection of awkward to use utilities for file transfer, email and indexing. IP was in use in corporations, but it was not the principle protocol. It may have been in their R&D facilities, because the Beards and Sandals guys were used to it. But other parts of large corporates were in bed with DEC or IBM or other computer suppliers. It was common to see an alphabet soup of proprietary protocols flying around corporate networks. It was…challenging. The Internet took off when these essential technologies were liberated from the restrictions of businesses who had an eye on a monopoly and they were able to be used to create networks of linked ISP networks that grew organically at a tremendous rate and soon eclipsed the size of the corporate networking market. All on the back of this flaky IP protocol that few people loved, but no-one owned. All the technical ducks lined up in the early 1990s and no one business was able to dominate and stifle the growth. ---
**Author:** ![donnie\_darko](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecae2f/32.png) [@donnie\_darko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/donnie_darko)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2013, 11:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330/70 "2013-08-09T11:59:43Z")
> [@filmstar-en](#): > > If it happened in 1992 in the UK, I am pretty sure these early dialup ISPs were starting in the US before then. The first one I was able to cite was in Massachusetts in November of 1989. But there could have been one before that that was lost to history, who knows. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-would-you-say-the-internet-was-born/659330.md?page=3)