But across most of the world, the Internet had not yet had much influence – 93% in the East Asia and Pacific region and 99% in South Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa were still offline in 2000. At that time very few computers around the world were connected to a network estimates for 1990 suggest that only half of a percent of the world population were online.Īs the chart shows, this started to change in the 1990s, at least in some parts of the world: By the year 2000 almost half of the population in the US was accessing information through the Internet. The chart starts in 1990, still one year before Berners-Lee released the first web browser and before the very first website was online (the site of CERN, which is still online). This chart shows the share and number of people that are using the Internet, which in these statistics refers to all those who have used the Internet in the last 3 months. Here I want to look at the global expansion of the Internet since then. At the time he was working for the European physics laboratory CERN in the Swiss Alps. The inventor of the world wide web was the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee who created a system to share information through a network of computers. But it was the creation of the world wide web in 1989 that revolutionized our history of communication. The Internet’s history goes back some decades by now – email has been around since the 1960s, file sharing since at least the 1970s, and TCP/IP was standardized in 1982.

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