For a full-fledged expedition into the history of the internet, be sure to check out Shmoop’s course called… History of the Internet. For the gist of things, stay tuned for Your Friendly Neighborhood Learning Guide.

The birth of the internet played out like a massive surprise party where some invitations got lost in the mail and not everyone on the guest list got the same memo about the location. It was practically a scene from your favorite 70s slapstick sitcom.

Eh…not quite. Not everything was super peachy keen and fun in the sun. The internet wasn't exactly created on a whim by some scientist tired of relying on the postal service. Back in the 50s (which is when the internet was first thought up), there was this little thing called The Cold War. Maybe you've heard of it?

The Cold War

Things first started to heat up once the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. President Eisenhower saw that little antennae-decorated space ball shoot into the sky and rounded up a group of the nation’s brightest scientists to address the concern. Its name: the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Its home: the Department of Defense.

If you're thinking the Prez just made a whole lot of something out of nothing…you'd be right in hindsight. Still, both the United States and the USSR had the atomic bomb at this point. If the Soviets now had control of things floating even outside the sky, that could spell serious trouble for the U.S. Tensions ran high, and no one wanted to be caught unprepared if the other side decided to turn them into radioactive jelly.

Bada bing, bada boom, the brain train. While studying up on how to make a communication system that could survive nuclear fallout in the early 1960s, the ARPA scientists started writing and publishing some mind-boggling stuff. J.C.R. Licklider suggested humans and computers might become symbiotic. Leonard Kleinrock put out the first paper on packet-switching theory. The RAND think tank resident Paul Baran (Paul BaRAND by his group, probably) also brought up the concept of a distributed network. His model for "hot-potato routing" would keep information flowing even if parts of the system got nuked.

The Department of Defense then brought Larry Roberts onto the scene around the mid-60s to get ARPA on track with its communications network. With four Honeywell mini computers acting as Interface Message Processors (IMPs) to make up the four nodes of the newly formed ARPANET, they now had an actual, physical system at four universities that sent and received information from each other. Near the end of October 1969, Leonard Kleinrock and the UCLA crew sent the first message over ARPANET: an attempt to spell "log in" that…crashed Stanford’s computer after the "lo." In fact, that’s where the phrase, "starting at a lo(w) point," came from (probably).

Be-lo-ve it or not, that's how the internet was born.

A few years passed and Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn teamed up to add some order to these new network possibilities by bringing all the different protocols up to snuff. Their Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocols dictated what computers should send, making it so that every computer would know exactly what every other computer was sending/receiving. (Who could've guessed that a universal system of translation would be popular?) It gradually gained momentum and became the standard ARPANET protocol in 1983. Later that decade, the Domain Name System (DNS) replaced Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler’s network information center (NIC) as a manager for domains (all the words that come before the .com/.org/.edu).

The World Wide Web

ARPANET closed its doors at the start of the 1990s, but inside CERN (an underground particle physics lab in Switzerland) Tim Berners-Lee was playing around with some Apple computers and ended up inventing the World Wide Web. By 1993, Berners-Lee released the code for free to the public, then hopped, skipped, and jumped from CERN to MIT in 1994 to found and direct W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium.

(In the middle of this, Jean Polly coined the phrase that will sink itself permanently into our logged on lexicon: surfing the internet.)

It didn't take email too long to explode once personal computers became popular. Networking equipment began to get cheaper, new browsers cleaned up the web-surfing experience, and internet usage became the monolith we know and love today.

Plus or minus a few questionable file-sharing sites.

(Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4, Source 5, Source 6, Source 7, Source 8, Source 9, Source 10, Source 11, Source 12)