ABSTRACT
Networking Concepts and History of the Internet Although the Internet was not exploited commercially until the mid-1990s, it has its origins in work by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), dating back to 1973, to develop a nonproprietary networking standard. Indeed, this work drew on pioneering work in the 1960s on packet switching. The first publication about the Internet was in 1974, and it was deployed widely by 1983. At first, the Internet was only used by the academic and military communities, but much has taken place in the last 20 years, both through exploiting new technologies and through broadening its user base. The shipping of Netscape Communicator in 1994 was an important landmark, making the World Wide Web as we now know it available to the public. Since then, the number of users and the amount of traffic on the Internet has grown at a consistently rapid pace.
