Today, most of us live, work, fall in love, and buy our goods over the web. To us, it's as natural as breathing. It wasn't always like that. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee came up with his own take on creating a unifying structure for linking information across different computers. He called it, "Information Management: A Proposal[1]." Later, Berners-Lee would call it the World Wide Web[2]. It wasn't a new idea, you can trace it back to Vannevar Bush in 1945, who described a Memex[3]: A desk, which would let users search microfilms to display documents from a library via trails of linked pages. Sound familiar? It should.
Others in the 1960s such as Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart would further the idea. But, in August 1991, Berners-Lee would take the theory into a working system[4]: The World Wide Web. The world would never be the same.
In 1989, the internet was still largely used by researchers, academicians, and the military. By 1993, it was well on its way to being the internet you know. Two developments made this happen: The web and the far more obscure Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX)[5]. Here's how it happened.
In the late 80s and early 90s, the internet had evolved from the military ARPANet[6] into a public network for the military, scientists, researchers, and academics. It was available if you were at the right school or worked at the right job, but most people had no access to it.
Even when you could use the early internet, you had to use ASCII-based applications like pine[7] and elm[8] for email and Unix command line/shell programs like ftp[9] and