Switched on: how computers transformed communication

In the 1950s, giant standalone computers were used in the UK, US and the Soviet Union for academic and military research. They offered extraordinary processing power, but they were hugely expensive and access to these machines was limited. As a result, researchers started ‘time-sharing’. This meant they could simultaneously access one computer through a series of terminals, although individually they had only a fraction of the computer’s power at their command.

As more computers attempted to join ARPANET, an agreed set of rules for handling information was required. In 1974, computer scientists Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf proposed a new method to send information through a network in a digital envelope, or ‘datagram’. The method was called transmission-control protocol, and became known as TCP/IP. This allowed computers to speak the same language, and ARPANET quickly grew into a global interconnected network of networks, or Internet.

By the end of the 1980s the Internet was expanding rapidly, but an advanced knowledge of computing was still needed to access the growing number of applications. The Internet needed to be easier to use. An answer to the problem appeared in 1989 when British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his employer, CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, in Geneva. Berners-Lee proposed a new way of structuring and linking information stored on the wide range of computers across the worldwide Internet.

Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer to initiate his new way of transferring information. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) created a simple way of transferring documents over the Internet. He also created a piece of software that presented documents in an easy-to-read format. He called the ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’. The Web became available for universal use on 30 April 1993, when CERN published a statement making it available on a royalty-free basis.

In the 1990s and 2000s more—and smaller—devices connected to the Internet, giving users unprecedented access to information at their fingertips. In 2008, the iPhone 3G arrived in Britain, driving a spike in mobile Internet usage, which has continued to grow ever since. We’ve come a long way from the room-sized machines at the centre of the first computer networks.