eli5: How was the internet made?
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What most people think of the Internet (graphical websites, youtube, etc) didn’t even exist until the mid-1990s. Early networks were entirely text-based. The original networks connected government and military institutions and universities (the original .gov, .mil, .edu top-level domains).
The Internet Protocol (IP) was developed as a method of sending data via small packets, similar to mailing letters via the post office.. The sender and receiver didn’t care how it got the data. I’d tell you a UDP joke but you might not get it.
The most widely used version was IPv4 which had 4-billion addresses. Which may sound like a lot, but institutions could reserve large chunks of addresses which reduced the number of available addresses. Until address translation/spoofing came around which allowed reusing network addresses in a local network. And now IPv6 is widely used.
Several programs/protocols were developed for sending email, transferring files (file transfer protocol = ftp), telnet (non-secure version of ssh before ssh existed), gopher, wais, etc.
The WWW started in early 1990s, HTML was very basic and only supported text with some inline static graphics. It was at this point where companies started ‘getting online’ by creating websites, and the explosion of the ‘dotcom’ companies in the late 1990s.
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