HomeBroadbandGuidesHistory of the internet: A timeline throughout the yearsHistory of the internet: A timeline throughout the yearsFrom the days of dial-up to the development of fibre and 5G. Here is all you need to know about the history of the internet.Written by Max Beckett, Broadband expertUpdated on 5 August 2025ShareOn this page1980s: The early years1990s: Much ado about dial-up2000s: The arrival of broadband2010s: Streaming, social media and speed2020s: Working from home, 5G and a full fibre futureThe Internet has been around for longer than you might think. The first email was sent way back in 1971, and computers first started to digitally share information in 1983.By the 1990s, it had gained widespread attention, partly thanks to Tim Berners Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web in 1989. It introduced the ability to create websites and provided a reason for everybody — not just businesses and computer scientists — to connect to the Internet. And by the 21st Century, the internet had become one of the most important inventions of all time.Today, more than five billion people use the Internet regularly. It’s become our most-used source for entertainment, life admin, work and communication. Lots of us rely on it entirely for our livelihoods. And it’s created some of the most popular ways to document and run our social lives.Find out what happened to make the Internet a reality for us all, and how it became one of humankind’s most essential tools.1980s: The early yearsThe 1980s was the first decade where the Internet resembled something like it does in the modern day. But it wasn’t capable of anywhere near what it is now.Reckon dial-up is old? In the early ‘80s, the Internet didn’t even have that. When it first started to connect computers, it was powered by a network called USENET. This still relied on phone modems to work but didn’t have a lot of the technology that dial-up eventually developed to be used by the public.As a result, the Internet in this decade wasn’t widely used by regular people. At this point, it was almost only ever used at big institutions or universities that had the computing power to access it. In fact, the BBC only gained internet access in 1989, relying on a network provided by Brunel University.But it wouldn’t be long before people could access the Internet from their homes. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web during his research at CERN in Switzerland.This was instrumental in making the Internet a useful tool for the public. Not only did it create the space for web browsers and websites to exist, but it paved the way for people to access visual media online — something we can’t imagine the internet without nowadays.If it wasn’t for the World Wide Web, the Internet would certainly have been used for various functional tasks, like emails or file sharing. But it wouldn’t have been the definitive source of information, content and communication that it is today.1990s: Much ado about dial-upDial-up internet took off in the 1990s, and the first commercial internet service providers (ISPs) started offering internet connections to regular households.AOL and other web browsers’ CD-ROMs were being sold in shops, letting you install and use their web software for a 30-day free trial (before being charged by the hour). Chat rooms sprung up for people across the world to discuss shared interests, paving the way for Reddit and social media.Websites were being created at a blistering pace to help anyone with an internet connection to learn, shop and socialise online. Some of the world’s biggest websites, such as Amazon, Google, eBay, IMDb and Yahoo, first went online in the ‘90s. The ‘Dot-com bubble’ of online marketplaces was growing rapidly, but it wasn’t to last for long.And while the web was quickly becoming increasingly useful for everyone, we didn’t get the seamless experience we’re all familiar with now. At this point, the internet needed full use of home telephone lines in order to work. That meant people were unable to make phone calls and browse the internet at the same time, and had to choose between family feuds over who gets to use what, or the cost of a second line.Dial-up connections also ran at a painfully slow 56kbps. For comparison, a 60Mbps internet connection — which is a very common speed nowadays — is equal to 60,000kbps. That's over a thousand times faster. And now gigabit (1Gbps) speeds are available in the UK, you can get speeds nearly *18,000* times faster than the first connections in our homes.These speeds made it really difficult to download anything apart from text. At full speed, a single, low-quality song (roughly 3.5MB) would take around 10 minutes to download. But internet speeds were much less consistent back then, so realistically it would likely take anything from 30 minutes to a few hours to download one song. If you wanted to download a low-quality movie (around 700MB), it would take 28 hours at full speed, or three to five days at l...