The Internet began in 1969 as ARPAnet. If so, why did it take almost 30 years to become publicly available? Why were there no websites or Internet access between the 1970s until the mid-1990s?
First things first:
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In 1969, 99.99% of the population did not have access to computers. The reason: the personal computer hadn’t been invented yet. PCs didn’t come around until the 1970s, and weren’t widely adopted until the 1980s.
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Even when people did get PCs, most of them still had to connect to the Internet via dial-up connections using modems. And before the 1990s, modems were slow. Ever use a 300 baud modem? It’s really, really, really slow.
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Because connections were so slow at first, pretty much the only thing the Internet was good for was sending text. That was great for e-mail, say, but pretty terrible for sending pictures. That’s why the World Wide Web (which is not the same thing as the Internet as a whole, just one specific way of using the Internet) didn’t get invented until the 1990s. There was no reason to develop a way of displaying text and pictures together over the Internet when the average connections was so slow.
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Dealing with both communications software and the 'Net back in the early days was pretty complicated. You couldn’t just point and click; you had to pour over manuals and learn obscure commands.
Even though the 'Net has technically been publically accessible for most of its history, reasons 1-4 kept the general public away from it until the mid-90s.
Even in the late '80’s (when I was young wnough to go about the house in my pajamas. Wheeee!) All you could get off them slow-arse thingy’s was “Where in the World was Carmen Sandiego”. 
That was the coolet game ever.
So long? I think it’s amazing it took so short a time!
ARPAnet was always “publically available” (as opposed to DARPA) in the sense that if you had the computer and the computer was hooked up, you could use it. Mainly, this meant being at a large university. Back in the day, when we had to walk to the Computer Center uphill in the snow in Keds, e-mail used bang addresses, teletypes were more common than monitors and 300 baud audio couplings were preferable to the 110 baud connections.
The two defining moments for what we now call “the internet” are the Supercomputing Act of 1986, sponsored by Sen. Al Gore, and the introduction of the internet’s GUI, the World Wide Web. The web, which made using the Information Superhighway easy and fun, didn’t really take off until the mid 90s, when there was enough stuff to make it worthwhile. Iirc, you could order a pizza over the net in 1994 or 1995. Again iirc, www.superbowl.com got 6 million hits on the day of the Superbowl in 1995, and by the middle of the next year was getting that many hits a day (they claim).
30 years is a mind boggolingly short time for something to emerge on the consumer market. If you look at telephones, airplanes, computers, mobile phones, PDA’s etc. They have all taken at least 30 years to get where they are.
It was the http/web technology that made it something Joe Shmoe on the street was even interested in, let alone available. Would your grandma be sending email if she had to set up a text-based SLIP/PPP connection and use a VT100 UNIX prompt to type her message with EMACS? Very doubtful.
I find it interesting how people forget just how FAST all this has happened.
As has already been pointed out, the reason we didn’t get the Internet until 5-7 years ago is because home PCs simply were not up to the task. Just eight years ago - less than a decade, folks - a 28,800 baud modem was considered a major luxury. I was an avid BBSer in the early 90s, and a 28,800 baud modem was the Jaguar of online fun. It was commonly stated at the time that 56K baud modems were not technically possible on home phone lines. Most people had 2400 or 14.4K modems, neither of which is really suitable for Internet use, not as many homes had home computers, and most computers were 286 and 386 machines. And if you wanted to buy a modem and set it up, it was an agonizing, frustrating process for anyone not comfortable with the inside of a PC, cracking open the case and installing the modem and farting around with DIP switches and worrying about interrupts and COM ports. I know my PCs and I had trouble getting the damned things to work sometimes. The casual user hadn’t a chance in hell.
Ten years ago, the average home PC was a 12MHZ 286 with 1-2 megs of RAM, no CD-ROM drive, and a 2400 baud modem. In the great majority of cases these computers ran on a DOS prompt or DOS shell, not Windows. (Macs were well ahead in terms of GUI, but otherwise were just as primitive, and were a small part of the market.) At the time it was a recent innovation for most home users to have a word processor that showed fonts on the screen the way they’d come out of the printer. That won’t run the Internet worth a damn.
Asa result of the fact that nobody had a computer that ws any good for Internet, there was essentially no content. Well, not the way there is today. Ten years ago I don’t believe the WWW had been invented yet, or it was in the infancy stage at best. Even a few years later it still sucked. Most of your favourite Web sites did not exist six years ago.
Bear in mind that it also takes some real visionary minds to appreciate the potential of each step in new technology. I remember when I was at the University of Illinois-Chicago in the early 90’s, and my department’s main computer was set up with a new program called ‘Mosaic’ that had been developed by the comp-sci folks at Urbana, as part of a semi-public beta-test. I played with it for a while, then said to myself, “Yeah, this World Wide Web thing-a-ma-jig will never replace FTP.”
I think back on that moment sometimes and cry. Gad, I could be a retired multi-millionaire by now …
Arpanet was initially limited to just a handful of universities as well as certain US military sites. Once Arpanet really got going, all the other universities wanted on. But the budget just wasn’t there to expand it for a long time. In the early 80’s, the univ. I was at only had a limited connection to a “real” Arpanet site. Most of our email, etc. went thru UUCP (Usenet) connections. We dial up a place down the road, send/receive our stuff, which then dials up the next place down the road etc. Email could take 1-2 days to go cross country that way. We wanted Arpanet bad, had a lot of Arpa grants, but still didn’t qualify.
The demand for Arpanet connections was immense but the $ to supply it just wasn’t there. Finally, the NSF got involved and set up NSFNet as their side of Arpanet. (The two nets were connected and used the same protocol. What distinguished them was merely who was funding your connection.) So the 'Net grew rapidly. This meant that a lot of schools started giving out 'Net access (email esp.) to everybody. The Arpanet used to have a printed directory of everybody on it. Email address, real name, real life contact info, etc. By 1990 this was no longer feasible.
This transition made a lot of "old timers’ very unhappy. Before, it was a few schools and then only people in departments like CS that had 'Net access. Now, idiot freshmen in the humanities had access and Bad Things were starting to happen. Usenet (while not really part of Arpanet but increasingly carried over Arpanet) started to have real problems with inappropriate postings. Most 'Net users today have never even heard of once so very useful Usenet. So there was a lot of resistance to expanding 'Net access, even at universities.
Note, that like everthing tech, the more sites there were, the cheaper it was to have a connection, etc. E.g., the first T1 connection to a metropolitan area was costly. But once it existed, hooking up a bunch of schools in the area was relatively cheap. The economics started to roll the right way.
When everything became “The Internet” and it was proposed that commercial entities be allowed access, the alarm bells went off. No way on Earth are we going to allow greedy corporate jerks to muddy “our” network. It really raised a stink. So it took several years of debating before the “.com” side of the 'Net got okayed. Al Gore really did play a key role in this. His group really made the Internet what it is today.
Many of the predictions came true (spam and porn) but the positives like good commercial web sites had not been widely foreseen. The WWW and browsers was the “killer ap” that arrived at just the right time (from the commercial point of view). (It could have/should have arrived 10+ years earlier, though.)
But in truth, it was the “.com” sites paying for 'Net access that generated the boom in 'Net growth. And that was the key event that the OP was looking for.
Your “almost 30 years” is quite off. ARPAnet was born in 1969. The Internet as we know it today began with the creation of TCP/IP, the common language of all Internet computers, in 1982. That’s thirteen years, not thirty. You can see Matthew Broderick as a hacker using the Intenet in WarGames (1983).
The World Wide Web, the portion of the Internet that uses HTML coding to allow you to hyperlink from one document to the next, was created in 1989, and became available to the general public in 1991, when the University of Minnesota’s Gopher browser was introduced.
Similar thing with me. In that same timeframe some geek coworkers and I had Internet accounts from a local provider. This was before anyone had ever heard of http or WWW, we were actually paying for a VT100 UNIX prompt. The big thing at the time was using Gopher to navigate. Ooooh, text menus! How user friendly!
One of my coworkers starts telling me about this Mosaic thing. He compiles it on our UNIX system at work (which was NOT connected to the internet) along with some test pages and shows it to me.
I say something like “Yeah, thats pretty.” I didn’t even think it would take off in the geek community, let alone the world. Seemed nice, but no big thing.
Damn.
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Note that the OP was in regard to the time it took for the Internet to become available to the public in general. Yes, you could have bought gear and software and run a TCP/IP site early on, but you couldn’t just connect it to the real 'Net for a long time.
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No explicit use of the Internet appears in War Games from what I can tell. He accesses “Joshua” first via a dialup line that was accidently left open (hardly “public”) and later from Cheyenne Mountain (again not “public”). The graphical interface shown in his dialup connection, etc., was of course a fiction.
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Gopher is completely independent of the WWW. Yes, it is one of the protocols that a browser may choose to implement, but it is in the same class as finger, telenet, ftp, news, etc. I.e., you can use a gopher client to access a gopher server without ever using a web browser or entering a URL. Just like a NNTP news server and a news reader are independent of the Web.
Clarifying one thing from my post: I refer to ".com"s appearing in the '90s when they actually appeared much earlier. But those were companies that had Arpa contracts, were Arpanet builders, etc., e.g., “bbn.com”. Using the 'Net for commercial purposes was (supposedly) not allowed for several years.
1990: The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access.
Wrong wrong wrong.
I started using internet back in 1993 when I discovered that the terminals at the public library had a link to a Gopher magazine index, and you could break out of it and find gopher links to the Usenet newsgroups. I’d heard about internet years before, and when I looked into it, there was a big problem:
Individual users had to pay SEVERAL HUNDRED BUCKS A MONTH for any sort of connection at all. Essentially the ISPs saw “individual users” as being small companies wanting business accounts.
Back then, the only true “individual users” were people who knew someone at a big company or a university and could wangle a free account without being an employee.
In Seattle the first modern ISP appeared around late 1993, “connected.com”. I think they charged $30 a month for 2400b dialup. Then “cyberspace.com” with about the same price appeared a few months later.
Internet modem speed wasn’t a problem back in the 1980s, since a 2400b modem could display a screen full of Gopher or Usenet (or compuserv) in less than a second. When the Mozilla browser appeared in 1994 the recommended speed was 9600b but I used mine for years at 2400b. (Just avoid any site with a 100K graphic images!)
Well in the version of the movie “Wargames” that I saw, Matthew Broddrick did NOT use the Internet to hack the DOD computer. He was just using an auto-dialer looking for open modem ports to access command line interface.
The big sea change came when the Internet was opened up for commercial purposes. Within 2 years after that, the Internet was exploding in size.
For the longest time, the internet was strictly non-commercial. That kept serious money out of it.
I could be totally full of crap, but that doesn’t seem right. I moved to Seattle in early summer 1993 and within a month or two had dialup access with Northwest Nexus at a blazing 9600bps. I remember that modem well, as I had to write a masterpiece of a business justification document to convince my boss that it was an absolute necessity. Of course the only use it ever saw was access to my personal email…