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Visualization of a portion of the
routes on the Internet.
Computers have been used to coordinate information between multiple locations since the 1950s. The U.S. military's SAGE system was the first large-scale example of such a system, which led to a number of special-purpose commercial systems like Sabre.
In the 1970s, computer engineers at research institutions throughout the United States began to link their computers together using telecommunications technology. This effort was funded by ARPA (now
DARPA), and the
computer network that it produced was called the
ARPANET. The technologies that made the Arpanet possible spread and evolved. In time, the network spread beyond academic and military institutions and became known as the
Internet. The emergence of networking involved a redefinition of the nature and boundaries of the computer. Computer operating systems and applications were modified to include the ability to define and access the resources of other computers on the network, such as peripheral devices, stored information, and the like, as extensions of the resources of an individual computer. Initially these facilities were available primarily to people working in high-tech environments, but in the 1990s the spread of applications like
e-mail and the
World Wide Web, combined with the development of cheap, fast networking technologies like
Ethernet and
ADSL saw computer networking become almost ubiquitous. In fact, the number of computers that are networked is growing phenomenally. A very large proportion of
personal computers regularly connect to the
Internet to communicate and receive information. "Wireless" networking, often utilizing
mobile phone networks, has meant networking is becoming increasingly ubiquitous even in mobile computing environments.
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