A Brief History of the Internet

About fifteen years ago, the Internet was only used by universities and the department of defense. Then, the powers that be, decided to commercialize the net. What this meant was that anyone, you, I, or a business could use the Internet. But what was this Internet?

Originally the Internet was limited e-mail and file sharing. What didn't exist was a convenient way to locate files since there was also no common way to view files.

But because the Internet had come from the university environment there was a wonderful desire to share with everyone. It was unheard of to create something on the Internet and then try to lock it up. There was a man in Switzerland who was going around telling everyone about what he called hypermedia. His name is Tim Burners-Lee. When he presented his ideas at conferences, people would listen politely and then argue that it could never happen. His ideas sounded like little more than a fantasy.

But then a wonderful thing happened, a college student named Marc Andreessen in Illinois came up with the idea of taking hyperlinks and the internet and welding them together. Marc helped invent the browser and nothing would ever be the same again.

Marc was partially responsible for creating a language to display information that you found on the internet. This was the real core of the browser. A simple language anyone could use to create a document with words and pictures. A language simple enough anyone could learn it in just a few hours. That is what we are going to do, teach you that language. A language called HTML.

And of course every good acronym has words to go with it; in this case HTML is hyper text markup language.