Imagine a history of World War 2 that failed to cover the events in 1930s Germany. Conventional histories of the internet are that incomplete, according to a researcher.

It is difficult to conceive of a world without the internet - today more than a billion users worldwide are connected - but just 25 years ago global network connections were vanishingly rare.

During the 1980s, small research networks linking a few hundred universities were gradually replaced by a commercial network with 300,000 users.

But history has failed to document this transitional period in any detail. Dr Doug Gale, president of Information Technology Associates, in Montana, is devoting his spare time to filling in the gaps.

TIMELINE   Take a tour through the history of the net

In the early 1980s, Dr Gale worked as a network administrator at the National Science Foundation (NSF), a US government agency that promotes research and education.

He says that at the time, there was just one research network, called Arpanet. It was run by the Defence Advance Research Projects Agency within the US Department of Defence.

Computer networking

But access to Arpanet was limited to universities with connections to the Department of Defence. As the advantages of computer networking became apparent, other universities began developing their own networks.

Ultimately, the NSF launched NSFNET, the immediate forerunner of the modern internet, to link all the networks together. But there are so few historical records from that time that Dr Gale describes the period as the internet's Dark Age.

"The Arpanet period is somewhat well documented because the corporation in charge - BBN - left a physical record," says Dr Gale. "Moving into the NSFNET era, it became an extraordinarily decentralised process. The record exists in people's basements, in closets."

Standard language

One of the most important of those individuals was Dr Dennis Jennings, now director of Computing Services at University College Dublin.

In the early 1980s, Dr Jennings made the key decisions at the NSF that would shape the modern internet. One of those decisions was to insist on a standard language, or set of protocols, to allow easy communication between networks.

Dr Jennings settled on the TCP/IP protocols, which had been developed by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf at Arpanet in the 1970s.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn were given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005

"I became known as 'Mr TCP/IP' because I was going around saying it has to be based around these protocols," Dr Jennings says.

"The decision to go with TCP was radical," he continues. "It was a great decision technically, but implementation of the software was poor and the initial performance was dreadful. But at the time we envisioned a few hundred users, not ten thousand."

Gradually, the software improved and more networks switched to TCP/IP.

But having a number of isolated networks speaking the same language wasn't enough. There needed to be a central backbone to connect the networks together. Moves began to form a network of networks, the first internet.

"That was the last piece of the jigsaw," says Dr Jennings.

The impetus for an internet came from the academic research community and a feeling that resources needed to be more evenly distributed, according to Dr Jennings.

'Concern'

"There was concern that some US researchers were not getting enough access to supercomputers," he says.

The NSF thought about a network to connect a handful of supercomputers, but Dr Jennings pressed for a more radical solution. In September 1985, he suggested creating a general purpose 'backbone' to connect any network user with any other user.

The internet today encompasses the globe and one billion people

"The supercomputer centres thought it was an appalling idea," he says. "But then they caught on to the idea that if there was a backbone, everyone would be able to access their network."

The thought of all that extra traffic and revenue was enough to persuade the supercomputer centres to support Dr Jennings' calls for a general purpose network. The NSF launched NSFNET in July 1986.

There was an understanding that, although NFSNET was billed as a supercomputer network, that would soon become a less important component," he says.

Central backbone

"And within months, if not weeks, supercomputers did become just a small part of NSFNET. The rest was - well, you know the internet - everything else."

In Europe too, there were calls for a central backbone to connect existing networks. But the picture was more complex, says Dr Kees Neggers, managing director of Dutch research network SURFnet.

Public networks in Europe were running a set of protocols called X.25 rather than TCP/IP, he says.

Soon the networks could no longer handle the demand and consensus emerged among users to start a TCP/IP backbone in Europe.

In 1991, Dr Neggers chaired a meeting in Amsterdam which helped establish a TCP/IP network called Ebone, which would become the European equivalent of NSFNET.

In both Europe and the US, TCP/IP was viewed as an interim communication solution, to be replaced with superior protocols in time, says Dr Neggers. But by the mid 1990s, TCP/IP had become so ubiquitous that it was never replaced.

The internet had become commercial by this time, according to Dr Gale. The turning point came in 1987 when the NSFNET backbone was upgraded to 1.544 Megabits per second (Mbps).

Although slow by today's standards - broadband connections of 24Mbps are now available to UK users - it was fast enough to encourage commercial organisations to take a more active role in running the emerging internet. By 1990, the Internet boasted 300,000 users and numbers have been growing ever since.

"It didn't hit home at a gut level the changes it would have for culture and society. I saw it as a scientist; I didn't see it as a human," says Dr Gale.

Dr Gale has barely scratched the surface of internet history, but in the future he intends to extend the focus of his studies. Once he has a good record of internet history in the USA, he will look at the history in Europe and elsewhere in the world. He will also extend the record further into the past.

"When I started the history project the initial focus was that Dark Age in the 1980s and early '90s," he says.

"But the archive is not going to focus on a particular era. There's more to human history than the Dark Ages."

"The Arpanet period is somewhat well documented because the corporation in charge - BBN - left a physical record," says Dr Gale. "Moving into the NSFNET era, it became an extraordinarily decentralised process. The record exists in people's basements, in closets."

Dr Gale has a simple explanation for the decentralised nature of the NSFNET era.

It was such an exciting project that lots of people just wanted to drop what they were doing and get involved   Doug Gale on the development of NFSNET

"It was such an exciting project that lots of people just wanted to drop what they were doing and get involved," he says.

There were collaborations between universities, governments, corporations and individuals in the private sector, Dr Gale explains. Although that led to rapid progress in the development of the internet, it has left a poor historical record.

"So much of what happened was done verbally and on the basis of individual trust," says Dr Gale. "If something needed to be done, there was never a formal contract; it was just done on the basis of a telephone call."

In 1973 the first non-US connections to the Arpanet, the forerunner of the modern internet, were set up. The first two countries to connect were the UK and Norway.

The first public demonstration of this transatlantic data link was given in the UK in November 1973.

The celebrations also mark 30 years since the basic protocols of the net were first set down.

National interest

Before the internet there was the Arpanet. This forerunner of the network of networks we rely on today was built to help US researchers exchange information more freely.

Before 1973 the Arpanet, funded by the US government's Advanced Research Projects Agency, was an entirely US phenomenon and, at that time, had 20 nodes.

But it became an international network in 1973 when the University College London (UCL) and Norway's National Defence Research Establishment joined via dedicated phone lines running at a mighty 9.6 kilobits per second.

The transatlantic link came about because of discussions between Larry Roberts, the driving force behind the Arpanet, and British scientist Donald Davies.

Mr Davies had done pioneering work on so-called packet switching networks that transfer data by splitting it up into small chunks. The technology was seen as essential if large numbers of people were to be able to use computer networks.

The theory of packet-switching had been talked about in the US but Mr Davies created a working network at the UK's National Physical Laboratory.

Arpa agreed to provide basic Arpanet hardware and fund a transatlantic link to Norway if the UK could find the cash to pay for a line to meet it.

Cash crisis

Mr Davies enlisted the help of UCL computer scientist Peter Kirstein to get the link working but the entire project almost failed because of institutional and official indifference.

Now millions connect to the net

Dr Kirstein said the British research funding council refused a request for cash help and the Department of Trade and Industry demanded business involvement before they would cough up funds.

Despite these setbacks, Dr Kirstein and colleagues decided to continue and the link went live, via Norway, in July 1973.

In November that year the first public demonstration of the link, and the researchers and information it gave access to, was demonstrated at a conference at the University of Sussex and then later in a public lecture.

Mr Kirstein said it was an instant hit with researchers and he remembers a dinner party at his home in that year which saw geeks queuing up the stairs to use the teletype terminal he had installed in his home so they could check their e-mail messages.

A presentation and ceremony is being held at UCL to commemorate 30 years of international links to the internet.

It was in 1973 that the Arpanet took the first steps to becoming the internet as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn drew up the basic specifications for ways to swap data across different types of network

The Arpanet avoided this problem by imposing strict standards on the ways that devices connected to it had to work.

But Mr Cerf and Mr Kahn realised that an neutral way of swapping data between different types of networks was essential. The end result of this was the TCP/IP protocol which powers the net to this day.

Vint Cerf vision of the Internet in 2035 . What would life be like in 2035? when the internet will be 52 years old. Almost every house hold gadget, device or appliance used in the home, office or vehicles, including toys will have a tiny computer chip and will have the ability to communicate with each other. Life on earth would be fully blown science fiction turned reality by 2035 as the internet would have penetrated 70 percent of the projected world population of 8.2 billion. Internet by then will be IPV6 the next generation Internet Protocol providing unlimited unique addresses.