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The history of the Internet is something else than everybody would expect. It was a planned system by the US Army. In the early 1960\'s, in the time of the Cold War, the American government was faced with the problem, how the country was to communicate after a nuclear war. So they created a non-centralized network that linked city to city and military base to base. The network works even if some parts of it were destroyed. In 1969 the ARPANET was created, to give civilians access to it. The users changed this high speed network to an electronic post office (->Email). Scientists and researchers used ARPANET to collaborate on projects. Eventually, people used it for leisure activities such as chatting or mailing lists (-> Usenet).
In the 1980\'s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) started a program to establish Internet access. They created a \"Backbone\" called NSFNET to connect college campuses via regional network , (Cole, Internet, page 10). But despite of the switching off of the NSFNET by the US government in 1995, which was misunderstood as the breakdown of the Internet, too many host-computers existed already to keep the Internet alive. Bill Clinton said in his 1997\'s inauguration address: \"Ten years ago, the Internet was a mystical province of physicists ; today, it is a commonplace encyclopedia for millions of schoolchildren\", (Clinton, 1997).
(cf. Cole, Internet, S.10; cf. similar PBS, https://www.pbs.org/internet/ history/)
In the early 1990\'s the Internet experienced explosive growth. \"Traffic on the Internet expands at a 341,634% annual growth rate\", (PBS, https://www.pbs.org/internet/history/). The main reason of this growing was the creation of the World Wide Web.
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