For this post, I want to view the internet through the lens of diffusion theory. The internet has been around for a while yet it took some time before it became a core part of most people's lives.
The first early adopters of the internet would be those who purchased home computers starting in the 1970s. These early home computers couldn't do a whole lot, but the consumers who bought them wanted them so they could be part of the "Information Revolution" or the future of technology.
What caused the internet's first spike in popularity was a combination of new discoveries. The growing popularity of email and the invention of DNS (converts hard-to-remember IP addresses into simple names) were some of the main causes of the internet's first spike in growth. This all caused the network to grow from 2,000 hosts to 30,000 from 1986 to 87.
The main reason the internet hadn't exploded in popularity yet was because of the barrier to entry. Advanced knowledge of computing was necessary to dial into the internet at the time, so access to the internet needed to become easier to allow those with very little computing knowledge to use it. This was solved with the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1989. It was invented by a man named Tim Berners-Lee who had proposed the idea to his employer to structure and link all the information on it's computer network to make it much easier to access.
In 1993, the Mosaic browser launched allowing those outside of academics to use the internet. This led to people discovering how to easily create HTML web pages, leading to the number of websites on the internet to grow from 130 to over 100,000 over the course of just 3 years. By 1995, the internet had now reached millions of users, with the most popular browser at the time Netscape Navigator having over 10 million users alone.
The internet would continue to grow from this point onward, yet there were still many who weren't using it. This would all change with the introduction of the iPhone and other smartphones in the late 2000s allowing people to access the internet from just about anywhere.
Nowadays, almost everyone uses the internet to some extent, and many of us use it on a daily basis. It's become basically essential to our daily lives and it's difficult to see what things would be like without it. However, there are still parts of the world that don't have easy access to the internet like we do. Many developing countries live without the internet opting for other forms of communication instead. The internet continues to grow to this day and there are no signs of it slowing down. Will the internet eventually reach all parts of the world, or will there always be somewhere that simply refuses to use it?
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