The seeds of internet were planted in 1969, when the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) of the US department of defense began connecting computers at the different universities and defense contractors.
The resulting network was called APRANET. The goal of this early project was to create a computer network using multiple paths. These multiple paths were in the form of telephone lines.
This was to save communication from any kind of distances. It means the world will stay connected if any part of network is destroyed because of any earthquake or kind of flood.
The ARPA had second other important reason for creating this network, which was, it would allow the people from remote area to share important computing resources. By being a part of this network, users could access faraway systems. Such as government or university owned mainframe computers.
At first APRANET has basically a large network serving only a handful of users, but it expanded rapidly. Initially the network owned four primary host computers.(a host is like a network server providing other computers services to connect to it)
APRANET host computers provided file transfer, communication services and gave connected systems access to network’s high speed data lines. The systems grow quickly as the number of hosts increased.
The number jumped across the Atlanticto Europe in 1973 and it never stopped growing.
In the mid of 1980’s another federal agency NSF (National Science Foundation) joined the project after the defense department stopped funding the department.