American Libraries and the Internet: The Social Construction of W ...

The split of ARPANET into MILNET (for military sites) and ARPANET (for civilian research sites) in 1983 enabled more civilian participation in the Internet. More networks were attached to ARPANET because the modularity of the Internet made it relatively simple to attach new networks, even those that used a different technical design. There was also a rise in commercial network services in the early 1990s, which implied that corporations could share responsibility for the Internet backbone. Finally in 1991, NSFNET decided to let Internet Service Providers (ISPs) take over Internet services, which opened up the Internet to a much larger segment of the American public. Commercial, social, and recreational activities also became acceptable on the Internet. By the year 1992, there were already over one million hosts connected to the Internet, and the number has kept growing meteorically (Zakon, 2002). If the Internet had still been under military control when the Web came along, it is likely that the Web would not have been such a big hit.

The growth of the Web was also directly related to the widespread diffusion of personal computers in the late 1980s (Lin, 1998). On the one hand, the development of personal computers has provided a powerful technical platform for Web software. For instance, modems became standard features for many personal computers, and many also came with online access software preinstalled (Klopfenstein, 2000). The graphic interfaces running on many computers also set a precedent for incorporating images with textual information.