So how did the internet start? In 1969, the United States Department of Defense funded the creation of ARPANET, a precursor network to the internet. ARPANET stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. ARPANET connected supercomputing centers run by government agencies and universities.

These institutions wanted to connect their individual networks for large-scale information transfer. However, many of them followed different standards and technical implementations. In the 1970s, the transmission control protocol and internet protocol, otherwise known as TCP/IP, were created to provide standards around the transfer of data that would allow these early networks to communicate with each other.

TCP/IP was researched and specified throughout the 1970s and adopted in the early 1980s. As different networks adopted TCP/IP, the interconnected global network of networks that is today known as the internet was formed.