Many experts predicted the existence of global networks of information long before the technology existed to actually establish the internet.
In the early 1900s, Nikola Tesla experimented with the idea of a “global wireless system,” and in the 1930s and 1940s, futurists like Paul Otlet and Vannevar Bush envisioned automated, searchable storage systems for books and other data.
However, it wasn’t until the early 1960s, when MIT’s J.C.R. Licklider promoted the concept of an “Intergalactic Network” of computers, that the first actual blueprints for the internet were developed. Within a short period of time, computer scientists created the idea of “packet switching,” a strategy for successfully delivering electronic data that would eventually grow into one of the key components of the internet.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, was developed in the late 1960s and served as the first functional prototype of the Internet. The U.S. provided the initial funding Multiple computers could communicate on a single network thanks to packet switching, which was employed by the Department of Defense’s ARPANET.
The web had a significant role in building the massive repository of information that the majority of us now access on a regular basis as well as in popularizing the internet among the general public.
REF: History.com
PIC: Encyclopedia Britannica, The Fact Site, Information Age, AXESS Network, Premium Times Nigeria