At the end of the fifties, the Department of Defence in America sought a way to ensure communication between military bases and cities after a nuclear attack. But neither cable nor any computer would be able to resist the power of nuclear bombs. And, if there were a central body or authority, which should control the network, this authority would probably be one of the first targets to be bombed. The RAND Corporation, a company of the Department of Defence, published a solution in 1964 called a decentralised network. This would allow information to be sent not directly from sender to recipient but in a way that information would be made smaller or subdivided into "packets". The target computer would then in turn reassemble this information. Today this "packet switching" technology is the fundamental basis to the key workings of the Internet.

Initially the Internet belonged to the Department of Defence, the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). In the 1960s ARPA connected several universities to test the draft network and one could say that the information just crawled between them. However over the next few years other civilians and scientists who thought up of other ways using this new technology were continually breaking into the system. Eventually the US military established their own and very restricted MILNET and left the new Internet to everyone else. So, it was in the 1970s that the ARPANET went international. Over the next few years the Internet just got bigger and bigger and soon the system was used to transmit files and news via Email the late 1970s. The APRANET grew very fast because of its decentralised architecture. This meant that any computer OS (Operating System) were able to join the network. Computers only had to use the "Network Control Protocol" which was later replaced by the actual standard "Transmission Control Protocol" in the early 1980s.

As the Internet is a global network of networks connecting millions of users worldwide via many computer networks using a simple standard common addressing system and communications protocol called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). This includes federal networks, regional networks, educational and some foreign networks. The connections between the different networks are called "gateways". These gateways are means whereby electronic data transferred worldwide.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the method by which Internet addresses in mnemonic form such as sunc.scit.wlv.ac.uk. are converted into the equivalent numeric IP address such as 134.220.4.1. To the user and application process this translation is a service provided either by the local host or from a remote host via the Internet. The DNS server may communicate with other Internet DNS servers if it cannot translate the address itself.

The Internet today as we know it was only made possible through creation, testing and implementation of Internet Standards. For most of its existence the Internet was primarily a research and academic network. More recently, commercial enterprises and a vast number of consumers have come to recognise the Internet's potential. Today people and businesses around the world can use the Internet to retrieve information, communicate and conduct business globally, and access a vast array of services and resources on-line.