The internet explained for 5-to-8-year-olds

Children are introduced to the internet almost on the day they are born now, when the first photo or video is taken and shared with admiring family and friends. As they grow, they keep using it, learning lessons ‘online’ – but do they really understand what the internet is? We’ve tried to explain it in simple terms here. Hope you find it useful.  

What is the internet?  
The internet is a network, or system, that electronically connects millions of computers worldwide. Since it is an interconnected network, it’s called internet, or to make it even shorter, the net. The connectivity between computers is established, supported and maintained by internet service providers or ISP. So if you have a laptop, mobile or app, and you want to connect to the internet, you will buy the services of a provider like Reliance, Airtel, Hathway or VSNL.  

How did the internet happen?  
The internet was one of the greatest inventions of the 1900s. In the 1960s, the U.S. government, some companies, and universities worked together to make a system that would let computers across the United States share information. They created an early form of the Internet called ARPANET in 1969. Though it was a limited area and limited user network, it worked.  

How did the internet grow? 
In 1971 electronic mail, or e-mail, was invented as a way to send messages from one computer to another. Researchers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed the wider area networking method called TCP / IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol) in 1973. In fact, the term “Internet” was first used in 1974 by them to describe the TCP / IP enabled network. By the mid-1970s many groups of computers were connected in networks, connected by machines called routers. On January 1, 1983 all routers on the ARPANET switched over to TCP/IP, creating the first wide area network of computers, which is now the internet as we know it.  

In 1989 came hypertext, which is a link between different parts of an electronic document or between different electronic documents. This became the basis of the World Wide Web, and the linked documents are the many websites we see today.