In 1990s a new media was born: the Internet. It links people all around the world through their computer terminals with modem connected to telephone lines. Originally developed in the fifties by the Pentagon, the Internet is now open to the world.

The Internet has revolutionized the computers and communications world like nothing before.

To get to the origins of the Internet, we have to go back in time to 1957. During the cold war years, a question was asked:" How could the U.S.A. authorities communicate after a nuclear war?". The proposal was to create a network able to operate while" in tatters"!

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA ) initiated a research project whose objective was to develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate. Its mission was to apply technology to U.S.A. defence. By 1966 research had developed sufficiently to pubblish a plan for computer network called ARPANET. By December 1969 the experiment was successful.

The four computers connected could transfer data. Thanks to ARPANET, researches could share one another's computer facilities by long-distance.
Internet changed greatly the way of working and that of studying.
About the history of INTERNET:
http://inventors.about.com/education/inventors/library/inventors/blinternet.htm