3. The internet grows.

For about twenty years - from 1970 to 1990, the internet remained an obscure system, as only universities and research laboratories joined their networks to one another. The internet grew steadily but not spectacularly.

Then around 1990 it all changed - Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at the nuclear particle lab, CERN in Switzerland developed what was to become the World Wide Web.

The new world wide web allowed individual pages of information to be linked together using hyperlinks - a method of connecting text in one document to another one. Also, there came along a new piece of software called a 'web browser' to make it simple to view those pages. For example Mosaic was an early browser.

In addition both images and text could be displayed which was a novelty.

Even non-technical people loved this, and so the internet started to grow faster as more and more private networks joined the internet. Internet users grew from thousands to millions and now to the billions of people using it today.

But the internet remains virtually the same - it is a 'network of networks'.