The phrase dot com enters our
language in the 1990s, but the sequence of innovations that leads to the Internet
goes back at least 40
years.
The first general-purpose computer, the nearly 30-ton ENIAC (1947), contains 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors. In
1959, the
INTEGRATED CIRCUIT puts those innards on one tiny chip. Before the entire world is networked, there is the
ARPANET--four computers linked in
1969. It introduces the concept of "packet switching," which simultaneously delivers messages as short units and reassembles them at their destination. The Apple II, Commodore Pet and Radio Shack''s TRS-80 are introduced in
1977--four years before IBM, soon to become synonymous with the term "PC," unveils its
PERSONAL COMPUTER. In
1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee creates "hypertext markup
language" (HTML) to make Web pages and the "Uniform Resource Locator" (URL) to identify where information is stored. These breakthroughs form the foundation of the
WORLD WIDE WEB.