by Larry Smith
There’s been lots of hype lately about the 10th anniversary of the World Wide Web.
But the Internet has existed in one form or another since 1969, and was conceived even earlier. In fact, there are more Internet birthdays and inventors than you can shake a stick at.
Yet for most of us the Internet did appear 10 years ago, when a start-up company called Netscape introduced a commercial browser to surf the Web. And it was Netscape’s explosive public offering in August, 1995 that marked the birth of the Internet age.
Like the development of radar in World War 2 - the Internet’s roots go back to the darkest days of the Cold War. In a sense, it was Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev who launched the Internet in 1957 when he sent Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, into Earth orbit.