The evolution of the internet

Whenever we want to understand where we are and how we got here, taking a brief look at history can be invaluable, especially in a world where the internet is now so ubiquitous that its origins have almost faded into myth. There are now generations of individuals who have never known a world without the internet. Effectively, that means the majority of those born post- 1994.

As with all life-changing inventions, the internet as we know it at present owes a great deal of its development to previous inventions and discoveries. These include the telephone, radio and television.

Developments in the progress of the internet can often be ‘grouped’ by years or decades. Long before the internet was even a twinkle of an idea, there were many real-world analogue proposals to create a physical representation of all the knowledge in the world. The concept of the internet, or at least of an immense repository of human knowledge, has been predicted in literature and the arts for centuries.

Imagining the internet

In 1728, when Ephraim Chambers published his Cyclopaedia, articles were linked through cross-references, an early real-world forerunner of the hyperlink. For Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, the Universal Decimal Classification was central to their Mundaneum proposal (Hanlon, 2008). This central repository of global knowledge was followed, in 1934, by Otlet's vision for the ‘Radiated Library’, where phones retrieved information before transmitting it as television signals.