History of the Technology, Chapter 5: 1985-2002 | 
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Two major trends have shaped the telecommunications landscape since the mid-1980s, both having profound influence on technology, the marketplace, and society. In computing, the convergence of personal computers and networking has made the Internet a ubiquitous and permanent infrastructure; many users regard the Internet as an information and communications utility which is nearly as important as telephone and electricity service. In telephony, the explosive growth in wireless has given the consumer much more flexibility and convenience. For many users, cell phones have replaced the wired home telephone as their primary communications device. At the beginning of the 1980s the Internet comprised only a small set of networks at universities or defense research establishments. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s the Internet grew enormously in the number of networks, computers, and users connected. By the mid-1990s, many people had begun to experience firsthand the potential the Internet offered for information, social interaction, entertainment, and self-expression. One of the most striking aspects of the Internet during the 1980s was its explosive growth. At the end of 1985 about 2000 computers had access to the Internet; by the end of 1987 that figure had risen to 30,000; by the end of 1989, the Internet linked 160,000 computers. This expansion was a largely unplanned and decentralized phenomenon, made possible by the modularity of the Internet's operating architecture designed by Kahn and Cerf. During the same time that the Internet dramatically expanded, personal computers (PCs) began to make their presence felt in the consumer and business markets. Although they had entered the hobbyist market in the late 1970s, personal computers did not find widespread application until the early 1980s. However, the growth of personal computing paralleled the growth of the Internet. In 1983, for instance, some 3.5 million personal computers were sold and Time magazine named the personal computer "Man of the Year." During the early 1980s several companies, such as CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy, introduced commercial online services for the home PC user. Subscribers accessed these services by means of a modem and software supplied by the service provider. At first these online services did not provide connection to the (as yet restricted) Internet, but did provide users with information services, chat rooms, and online shopping. These online services helped to introduce large numbers of users to the practice of retrieving information and communicating with others by means of their home computers. In 1985 Stewart Brand set up the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) as an alternative to the commercial systems. The WELL soon became known as a gathering place for advocates of counterculture ideas and free speech. By the late 1980s, therefore, several million computer users could exchange mail and news over these networks. Though these systems were not parts of the Internet, they established links to it fairly soon. In 1991 the National Science Foundation issued a plan to foster the commercialization of the Internet. Under this plan, Internet service would be taken over by competitive Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who would operate their own backbones. ISP subscribers would connect their computers or local-area networks to one of these backbones, and the ISPs would allow for intercommunication among their systems. On 30 April, 1995 the US government formally terminated its control over the Internet's infrastructure. Privatization opened up the Internet to a much larger segment of the American public. Commercial online services could now offer Internet connections, and the computer industry rushed into the Internet market. A necessary precondition to large-scale public participation in the Internet was the development of network applications, particularly search engines. Without an easy-to-use search engine, an Internet user had no way to locate desired information or to transfer files easily. In the early 1990s the University of Minnesota introduced its gopher system, which helped users to organize and to locate information. But the most significant advance in this area was the World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee of the European high-energy physics establishment CERN. In December 1990 the first version of the Web software began operating within CERN, and CERN began distributing its Web software over the Internet to other high-energy physics sites. Among them was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. In 1993 an NCSA team led by Marc Andreessen developed an improved Web browser called Mosaic, the first system to include color images as part of the Web page. When NCSA officially released Mosaic to the public in November 1993, over 40,000 users downloaded copies in the first month; by the following spring more than a million copies were in use. In 1994 Andreessen and his team left NCSA to develop a commercial version of Mosaic called Netscape. The Web and browsers like Netscape completed the Internet's transformation from a research tool to a popular medium. The growing popularity of wireless telephony, more commonly known as "cell phones," paralleled the explosion of the Internet. A series of papers in Bell Labs Technical Journal in 1979 outlined the basic principles of cellular telephony, but sustained development and market penetration occurred only after the mid-1980s. From their start in the early 1980s, cell phone usage boomed: the industry grew exponentially from 25,000 subscribers in the United States in 1984 to 1 million in 1987, to 4 million in 1990, 9 million in 1992, and more than 50 million in 1999. Similar growth occurred in many other countries; in Hong Kong, for example, more than half the adult population operated cell phones by the end of 1991. |
