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All sites on the internet had only numbers for their addresses, and these numbers were long (for example 212.58.224.84) and hard to remember. (You can still find these numbers today when you look for a web page as your browser 'pings' a website to make sure it exists.) The name of a website is translated into numbers by the Domain Name System created by the The University of Wisconsin.

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Tomorrow Who knows? - but it will be exciting!

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As the internet became more user-friendly, and computers became more powerful, people began to think about putting a graphical user interface (GUI) on the internet. The first of these programs was developed by Marc Andreessen, who worked with several different academic institutions to make a program called Mosaic. (Mosaic was the ancestor of Netscape, which was the source of Firefox, a browser which is very popular today.)

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The new system was set up, linking University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The very first attempt to send data was from UCLA to Stanford. Three letters into the first word, the system crashed.

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It was not long before the 'browser wars' started. Microsoft used its infamous 'embrace, extend, extinguish' policy to drive users to its Internet Explorer browser with types of data that could only be read by people using its product. Netscape responded by doing the same, and the internet was in danger of breaking into sites which could only be read by one browser or the other. The world-wide web consortium (W3C) was developed to provide a set of standards that everyone could use.

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Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn worked on ways of making packets easier to send and receive. They invented a process that later became known as TCP/IP which is still in use today. In a discussion paper they refered to the system which was to use these protocls as 'the internet'. The name became popular, and the system has been called this ever since.

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Until now, the internet was only a text-based system. A menu interface called 'gopher' was the most popular way of reading information. More and more sites were putting information on the internet, and Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva decided that the best way of moving from one site to another was by putting links into the text itself. This became known as 'hypertext'.

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The internet is used by millions of people all over the world. On an average day English for Everyone sends tens of thousands of pages to people from 137 countries, and our site is not at all unusual. The internet is bringing the world together, and not just through text - pictures, speech and film are becoming more common as the world goes broadband.

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Once it was working properly, the system added new computers (called 'nodes'). However a method of sending messages in a standard way had to be developed so a programmer called Ray Tomlinson wrote a program for sending messages by 'e-mail'. At this time only a few hundred military and academic researchers used the system, which was slow and needed considerable computing skills.

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The United States airforce became worried that if the country was attacked with atom bombs it would not be able to control all its ships, bombers and missiles. They asked Paul Baran at the Rand research institute to find a solution. He came up with a design which sent information in small 'packets' which could find their own way to the computer that needed them. If part of the route was destroyed, the packet would find another way.