What has caused the Internet to expand so rapidly?

[♥f.r.e-▬§.a.h]

What, do you guys think, has caused the Internet to expand so rapidly in the recent years?

Thanks for your answers.

[Micael]

well i guess this is your homework, so go check on Wikipedia, instead of getting this easy answers and learning nothing

[Fester Frump]

So, the Internet goes all the way back to ARPANET from the 1970s. It was used to link together defense contractors with the DoD and Universities doing research. Everything was very cryptic by today's standards - no pictures, no video, no music, no graphical windows.

What made it take off was a perfect storm of improvements in networking technologies and improvements in PCs (going from command line interfaces to GUI being a huge part of that).

Keep in mind what the Internet is. The Internet is a network made up of networks. Just because there are more devices connected to consume content doesn't mean the Internet itself is expanding.

MS-DOS was predominate PC operating system until Windows 95 came out, in late 1995. Microsoft had Windows 3 (3.1), but those never really took off. Prior to Win95 PCs didn't even have native networking capability built into the operating system. You had to go purchase a NIC (they cost upwards of $400 then) and the networking operating system of your choice (at the time the big NOS in the market was Netware by Novell). There were at least 5-8 competing NOS platforms, none of which inter-operated with the other. TCP/IP was the geeky NOS off to the side that universities ran on Unix workstations from Sun. In September 1995, when Win95 was released it included a TCP/IP protocol stack. This meant that a Windows PC could now connect to an IP network without purchasing a very expensive third party TCP/IP stack from the likes of FTP software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTP_Software), most of whom went out of business virtually overnight.

At about the same time Tim Berners-Lee came up with HTML, which is the language of the WWW. Berners-Lee's problem was displaying information that came from all these different sources. HTML and a web browser made it possible to display information in a consistent manner regardless of the source operating system.

Sites started popping up on what we know of as the WWW, companies started connecting to the Internet and advertising their products on web pages quickly.

But the thing that really made the Internet take off for consumers was pornography. Porn was the first "for profit" use of the Internet that actually made money. These pornography web sites needed more bandwidth, which funded the creation and construction of the high speed physical network. This is where the geeky Internet and the average consumer first interacted. Then people started to get hooked on email, use the Internet for research, online commerce, now Facebook, twitter etc.. The "old" Internet (IPv4) is pretty much maxed out on address availability now. Expansion today is the number of devices that connect to it. No longer do people have one computer in their home, they have multiple things that connect to the Internet.