The very first model of the internet was built by the government's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), by the name of ARPANET. It was a project with the vision of primarily military application, and that was to have an alternate method of communication across the United States in the event of a catastrophe, arguably anuclear one. In order, to use the best minds for this networking experiment, ARPA decided to tie together a number of universities that it was funding. The one million dollar contract to turn the theory into reality was awarded to a small consulting comapny called BBN (Bolt beranek and Newman) in 1969. This was primarily because none of the bigger companies like IBM saw enough potential to even bid for the project.

By 1971, ARPANET had spread to 15 sites. However, all were either universities or some sort of government agencies. Therefore, the beginnings of the internet were quite elitist being primarily for academics and official use. In 1972 E-mail is invented and quickly becomes the most popular application. Same year, the first public demonstration of the internet at the International Conference on Computer Communications becomes what is termed a "roaring" success. And so in 1973, University College London and Royal Radar Establishment in Norway were added as the first international sites. Finally in 1975, the ARPANET was transferred by DARPA to the Defense Communications Agency (now Defense Information Systems Agency) as an operational network.

Even though it is not possible within the scope of this discussion to go into a lot of the advances that were essential for the further development of the internet, it is essential to acknowledge their contribution. Even though many of the initial estimates about the internet went wrong, it was the vision of those involved that made the internet's expansion possible. For example in 1982 as the total number of hosts broke two hundred, DCA and ARPA defined the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP) as the protocol suite for ARPANET. The first of January, 1993 was a historical moment in the history of the internet because the military finally parted ways from ARPANET and formed a separate MILNET. Thanks to the TCP/IP and the decentralised structure that resulted, the number of hosts grew exponentially and hit 1000 in 1984 and the Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced. With the rapid progress and development that was going on, the internet became accessible to most students and organizations with number of hosts jumping to one hundred thousand in 1989. However, businesses and households still remained largely aloof from this source of benefit, largely because of the cost and the lack of technical know-how. By 1990, ARPANET technically ceses to exist and the NSFnet created by the National Science Foundation completely takes over.