Reality → Tech → Internet → Origin
Birth and growth of the Internet are intertwined with developments in telecommunication and the computer industry (see Sheet). In the late-1960s, the US Department of Defense sponsored a packet switched network, the initial ARPANET, connecting different computers of four university research locations (UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford, and University of Utah) with the twofold civilian objectives of fostering research data exchange and utilizing existing computing capacity efficiently. Packet switching was important for fast and robust data transmission. About 10 years later, three networks that were running at different protocols were successfully interconnected, forming a small network of networks, a progenitor of the physical Internet [1] . In 1989, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN with the objective to facilitate worldwide scientific information sharing. The original transfer protocol described the use of text markups to create hypertext with links to other text. The Web developed quickly into the dominant user of the physical Net, with 'browser wars' and explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s [2] .
Mosaic, released in 1993, was the first program that provided access to the Web for the public. It was quickly followed by the highly successful Netscape browser, which contributed to an 8-fold increase of Internet use in 1995, succeeded by a 10-fold increase in 1996. However, by the end-1990s Netscape's browser was crowded out through Microsoft's aggressive marketing of the Internet Explorer. By then, the Web had become the agent of the 'Global Village' predicted by McLuhan.