The Internet was born over 20 years ago, and arose from the effort to communicate the Department of American Defense network ARPAnet with several other networks bound through satellite and radio.  ARPAnet eta an experimental network of military investigation, particularly the investigation on how build networks that could bear you fail partial (as them produced by bombardments) and even so to function. 

In the ARPAnet model, the communication always occurs between a computer source and a destination source.  The network assumes for itself that is fallible; at any moment any part of the network can disappear.  The network was designed to require a minimum of information from the computers that are linked to it. 

The United States was able to develop a network that functioned (the predecessor of the present Internet) and the academic users and investigators that had access to it quickly became addicts.  The demand for the network rapidly spread over.  In response to the pressures of the market the developers of the Internet in the United States, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, began to put the IP (Internet Protocol) software in all kinds of computers.  It became the only practical method to communicate computers of different manufacturers. 

At the same time that Internet strengthened, many companies and organizations began to build private networks using the same ARPAnet protocols.  It became obvious that if these networks could communicate among themselves, then it was possible that the users of different networks around the world could communicate as well, for the benefit of everyone. 

Of these new networks, the most important one was the NSFNET, promoted by the National Science Foundation, a U.S. government agency.  At the end of the eighty's the NSF created five centers of ­­­­supercomputers in different important universities.  Until then the world's fastest computers were only at the disposal of armament manufacturers and investigators of very large companies.  With the creation of supercomputer centers, the NSF put this technology at the disposal of any academically investigation.  At first, the NSF tried to use the ARPAnet network for the communication of the centers, but this strategy failed due to bureaucratic problems. 

In response to this, the NSF decided to build its own network based on the technology IP of ARPAnet, this network connected the centers by means of connecting the telephone by 56,000 bits per second. 

The cost of the telephone line depends on the distance, due to this it was decided to create regional networks.  In each region of the country the schools were able to connect to a nearby network.  Each chain was connected to a supercomputer center from a single point.  With this configuration, any computer could eventually be communicated with another, promoting the communication among the neighbors. 

The fact of sharing supercomputers permitted the computation centers to share resources not related to the centers.  Suddenly, the schools that participated in the network had access to an extensive universe of information and collaborators at the reach of their hands.  As time went by the traffic in the network increased and the telephone lines connected to it got saturated. 

In 1987 a contract was celebrated to administer and up date the network, with the company Merit Network Inc., in contribution with IBM and MCI.  The old network was improved with telephone lines of greater velocity (by a factor of 20) and with more powerful computers.