The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by JCR Licklider. (Licklider was the head of the computer research program at DARPA.) He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everybody could quickly access data and programs from any site. This concept is very much like the Internet of today.

In 1966, Lawrence G Roberts, one of Lickliders successors at DARPA began to put together his plan for the 'ARPANET '.At the conference where he presented his paper,, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davis and Rodger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury told Roberts about the work at NPL as well as the work of Paul Baran and others at RAND. The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for for secure voice in the military in 1964. It happened that the work at MIT (1961 - 1967), RAND (1962 - 1965) and NPL (1964 -1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the others work The word 'packet' was adopted from 'NPL' and the line speed used in the ARPANET design was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50kbps.

In 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA funded community had refined the overall structure and specifications, and RFQ was released for the development of the packet switches called Interface Message Processors. The RFQ was won in December 1968 by Frank Heart at BNN. As the BNN team worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized by Roberts working with Howard Frank. The network measurement system at UCLA. Kleinrocks Networks Measrement Center was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET. All this came together in September 1969 when BNN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer was connected. Engelbart's project on 'Augmentation of Human Intellect' at Stanford Research Institute provided a second node. SRI provided the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth Feinler and including functions such as maintaining tables of host name to address mapping as well as directory of the RFC's. 1 month later, when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first host-to-host message was sent. Two more nodes were added. These nodes incorporated application visualisation projects (investigating methods of display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over the net.) Methods of 3D representations over the net were also investigated.

By the end of 1969, four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET and the budding Internet was off the ground. Computers were added to the ARPANET and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to- Host protocol and other network software. In December 1970, the Network Working Group finished the initial ARPANET host-to-host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol. As the ARPANET sites completed implementing NCP during 1971 - 1972, the network users could begin to develop applications. In 1972, e-mail was introduced. In March, Ray Tomlinson at BNN wrote the basic e-mail message send and read software. In July, Roberts wrote the first e-mail utility program to list, read, file, forward and respond to messages.

At heart, what makes the Internet work is a set of common standards known as Internet protocols or TCP/IP. A computer of any type can connect with the Internet ans successfully exchange data as long as it can run these protocols. Running across this infrastructure are services such as the World Wide Web on the same way any application program runs on a stand alone computer. All these services depend on client/server architecture. There are many other services and applications on the Internet, these include FTP(File Transfer Protocol), Usenet(World-wide discussion groups and Gopher(menu based indexes)