The internet is related to but distinct from the World Wide Web. A simple, technical way to define the internet is as a global network connecting computers, phones, printers, and other devices—a “network of networks” as Andrew Russell (SUNY Polytechnic Inst.) described in an email. The World Wide Web, on the other hand, is a collection of web pages that are accessed via the internet. ARPANET was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Department of Defense. The network, launched in the late 1960s, was created “not for direct military use, but to connect their civilian researchers who were at different universities,” explains Janet Abbate, professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and author of Inventing the Internet (1999), one of the first histories of ARPANET and the internet. Many popular accounts of the development of the internet follow a “linear progression,” with ARPANET as the point of origin, Russell explains. This “narrow history,” he says, traces events from the creation of ARPANET in the 1960s to the delineation of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (sets of rules for how data can be shared over the internet) to the development of the web to “commercialization in the 90s.”
But scholarly histories have moved on. Recent work, for example, has focused on the development of networks other than ARPANET. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (2011), Eden Medina (Indiana Univ.) writes about the development of Project Cybersyn in Chile. The purpose of the project, Medina explained to Perspectives, was to help Salvador Allende’s socialist government “nationalize the most important industries of the economy.” According to Medina, the government wanted to use a computer system to gather and visualize data, and design “new communication channels” that would enable it “to make management decisions on a national scale.” The project began in 1971 and ran until 1973, concurrent with the development of ARPANET but completely independent of it.
Medina argues that examining Project Cybersyn reveals the history of computer networking as a “global history.” “When people think about computer networks and the internet, very quickly they think of it as a US technology,” she says, “but there were these other networking efforts that were taking place at around the same time.” Scholars are also researching the development of networks in other countries, such as France and the USSR.