By "Dr Jeff" (Dr. Jeff Drobman) (A good resource on Internet history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet) My Involvement -- A Little More History I was privileged to work on the "B machine" (a DEC PDP 11/780 minicomputer, one of 3 hosts at UCLA at the time) from 1975-79 to help test the ARPANET. Our Prof. Gerald Estrin-led PhD/RA group sent files among the 3 UCLA hosts (2 PDPs and an IBM 360/91 large mainframe) and to/from a GE/Multics mainframe computer at MIT (node 6 or 7), as part of our own doctoral research on computer aided design (SARA) funded by the US Dept. of Energy. The first host ever at UCLA was an XDS Sigma 7 mainframe, replaced ca. 1974 by a pair of then state-of-the-art DEC PDP 11/780 minicomputers ("A" and "B"). UCLA's CCN (Campus Computing Network), a 1969 UCLA local network of 2 IBM 360/91s with scores of primitive CRT terminals, had its main IBM 360/91 connected to the UCLA IMP, hence connected to the ARPANET, as the 3rd host around that time (1974). My Perspective The spread of the Internet has become more limited by politics than by technology or resources. The incredible instant democratizing and educational power of the Internet is driving many do-gooders to make the net accessible to all the world, including the Third World -- while communist China, Cuba, Arab fundamentalist states, and other states in political opposition to freedom of thought and expression continue to resist -- hopefully eventually futilely. Never in the history of the world has such instantaneous, multi-party, world-wide communication been possible. And of course, sadly, the Internet released not only a genie, but a "dark side" Pandora's Box of cyber-wasteland (e.g., porn, stalking, phishing, spam, viruses/worms/trojan horses, denial of service attacks) which will hopefully in the long run be overshadowed by overwhelming benefits. The Future Finally, note that the original creators of our Internet, back in 1969, admitted they could not have imagined all that the Internet has become. Perhaps we will not be able to predict the future course of the Internet either. The commercialization of the military network (1991) opened the bottle to free the genie, and the applications of email (1972) and web browsing (1989) provided the momentum. More recent innovations such as music file sharing (Napster et al.), diary sharing "MySpace" and ubiquitous "blogs" (abbreviation of "web log," a cross between an online diary and a bulletin board), video sharing (Youtube.com) just indicate that we are only limited by our collective imagination. The Internet will hit 1 billion users soon (1/6th of the world's population), spreading the fastest in China. But there are even Internet cafes now in remote parts of Africa. There are plans to bring use to 50% of the world (3B) in the next 10 years or so (e.g., chip-maker AMD in 2004 introduced an Internet access handheld device while announcing a goal to reach 50% by 2015). Finally, note that with the introduction of Internet-enabled cell phones, the concept of the "Internet" is expanded to included the cellular phone networks of the world, and hence, the number of "users" and "hosts" goes up dramatically (to say 3-4 billion).