ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the history of the internet from a global perspective. The most all-encompassing of the many and controversial definitions of the internet is perhaps network of networks in accordance with the meaning first supplied in December 1974 in the Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program document on which TCP/IP protocol is based. But the internet's history began long before 1974, stretching at least as far back as the 1950s with the Cold War technological battles and to the 1960s with the creation of early computer networks and the American ARPANET project in particular. Internet is also a commercial and financial medium, in fact. In October 1957, plum in the middle of the Cold War, the USSR launched its first artificial military satellite into orbit. Two ideas that later became key characteristics of the internet did, in fact, emerge from the political-military context: Net structure and packet switching communication.
