How Old Is the Internet?

By Staff WriterLast Updated April 05, 2020

The Internet was activated in 1969 as a network of university mainframe computers, making it 45 years old in 2014. The original name for the Internet was ARPANET because it was created by ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA was created in 1958 by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Some of the first universities attached to ARPANET included Harvard, Stanford, UCLA and MIT. Today’s Internet is usually traversed using a series of Web pages known as the World Wide Web, with each page typically accessed by entering a URL address into a browser. The World Wide Web is only 25 years old in 2014 and was proposed in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The first webpage was posted in 1990.